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WORKS AND DAYS 



WORKS AND DAYS 
BY HAMILTON WRIGHT 
MABIE 




NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
MDCCCCII 



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Copyright, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 
By The Outl^ox Company. 

Copyright, 1902, 

By Dodd, Mead and Company, 

All rights reserved. 



First Edition Published April, 1902. 



THE IJBHARY •F 
Tvw) CoPite RECEtvea 

APR. 26 1902 

(^^, t-t- ;<T^v 

0LA8S rt XXo.' No. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 



I- 

TO 

MARSHAL HUNTINGTON BRIGHT 



CONTENTS 

Page 

The Highest Service of Love i 

Character and Fate 9 

Taking Hold 19 

Looking Ahead 22 

Working Out 25 

Sharing Success 28 

The Smaller Vision 31 

On Guard 34 

The Real Preparation 37 

The Light of Faith 42 

Moral Uses of Memory 45 

Pagan Words 49 

The Lesson of Life 53 

True Self-confidence 59 

Unused Power 62 

The Positive Life 67 

Which Background.? 74 

The Prayer of Love 78 

Personal Atmosphere 83 

The Larger Relationship S8 

vii 



Contents 

Page 

In Remembrance 93 

The Contagion of Faith 96 

Dangerous Foes 102 

Inviting the Best Things 108 

The Grace of Goodness 113 

Personal Deflection 119 

The Discipline of Success 123 

The Best Preparation 128 

Faith-Inspirers 132 

The Test of Opportunity 136 

The Sterility of Restlessness 140 

Something to be Cultivated 144 

The Triumphant Life 148 

The Best in the Worst 151 

Spiritual Self-Reliance 154 

The Highest Value on Ourselves .... 159 

Patient Loyalties 163 

Cherish Your Ideals 166 

The Denials of God 169 

The Soul of Work 172 

Self and Others 177 

Wait for Results iSi 

At Our Doors 185 

After the Night 188 

Success in Failure 192 

Greater than Heredity 198 

The Secret of Freshness 202 

Patience with Ourselves 207 

viii 



Contents 

Page 

Give and Take 211 

Work that Nourishes 214 

Not Getting but Giving 217 

Strength out of Weakness 220 

Waiting 223 

A Beautiful Talent 227 

The Supreme Service 230 

Live in To-Day 233 

A Hint from a Poem 236 

The Corruption of Self-Pity 240 

The Real Power in Life 243 

The Grace of Opportunity 246 

Forgetting the Things that are Behind . 249 

Believe in Your Work 253 

Earn Your Success 256 

Light in the Shadow 262 

The Waste of Friction 266 

Discipline of Hindrance 271 

The Limits of Helpfulness 275 

Healthy Discontent 280 

Love and Work 283 

Aspiration and Ambition 287 

The Grace of Acceptance 293 

The Better Way 296 



WORKS AND DAYS 



THE HIGHEST SERVICE 
OF LOVE 

AFTER all that has been said in so 
many forms of speech, love re- 
mains unexplained and unfathomable ; 
we know its manifestations, its modes 
of expression, its surrenders and sacri- 
fices, but the heart of it we do not know ; 
if we could penetrate this mystery, we 
should understand God. The mys- 
tery of God, which lies like a luminous 
cloud about us, would be revealed if 
it were possible to analyze and probe 
to the bottom any pure human love. 
Wherever love is, there dwells the 
mystery of God ; mysterious because 
it is too sacred for the searching of 
thought alone, and too vast for the 



Works and Days 

capacity of present experience. The 
touch of the infinite is upon it, and it 
shares the boundlessness of the infinite ; 
for no time is set for its duration, and 
no limits for its growth. Age, pain, 
weariness, sorrow, denial, do not weaken 
it ; and it faces death with sublime 
indifference. 

There is an instinct in the soul of 
love which knows that it is immortal. 
There come to it at times the premoni- 
tions of eternity ; it cries out for in- 
finite capacity and limitless time. No 
language is adequate to bear the burden 
of its expression or to reveal the glory 
of its pure and passionate craving to 
serve, to give, to surrender, to be and 
to do for the child, the wife, or the 
friend to whom it goes out in a silent, 
unreturning tide. After it has said 
everything, it retreats baffled and help- 
less because it has left everything un- 
said. Its constant pain is the burden 
of unexpressed feeling. Try as it may 
every form of speech known to men, 

2 



The Highest Service of Love 

and in its heart of hearts there remains 
the consciousness that the deepest and 
truest things have not been said. The 
heart of man has overflowed in song, in 
art, in noble devotions of word and 
deed, but the heart of man is still an 
unplumbed sea. If love were mortal, 
it could find a voice sweet enough and 
of adequate compass to convey that 
which lies In the depths of its being ; 
but how shall the immortal put on 
mortality ? When the Infinite, twenty 
centuries ago, put on the finite, and the 
immortal wore the garments of the 
mortal, the divine was compelled to 
hold back the most glorious part of Its 
nature because there was no language 
among men fine enough for Its purity 
or capacious enough for its vastness. 
Christ was not only the revelation but 
the veiling of the Father. If love were 
finite, it would not bear forever in its 
heart a deep sense of helplessness ; it Is 
ready to give all, do all, save all, but it can 
give only a cup of water where it would 
3 



Works and Days 

open a fountain, and plead and pray 
where it would gladly lay down its life. 
The pain of love is rooted in its im- 
mortality. 

And as its pain of unexpressed feeling 
and devotion is rooted in its immortality, 
so also is its divinest revelation of itself 
For the highest service of love is not to 
console but to inspire, not to comfort 
but to stimulate. In the wreckage of 
hopes which sometimes overtakes the 
strongest and the best, love alone finds 
a hearing, and brings that sense of com- 
panionship which is the beginning of 
consolation. Wherever darkness settles, 
there shines the light of love ; and when 
the smitten arise out of the prostration 
of grief, it is the leading of this light 
which they follow with steps that grow 
stronger as they struggle on. The sor- 
row of the world has always sought the 
heart of love as its only place of hope. 

But love has a higher ministry ; its 
glory is not in service in hours of dis- 
aster, but in its noble compulsion to do 
4 



The Highest Service of Love 

and to seek the best. He loves best 
who demands and secures the highest 
from the loved one. The mother loves 
her child most divinely, not when she 
surrounds him with comfort and antici- 
pates his wants, but when she resolutely 
holds him to the highest standards and 
is content with nothing less than his best. 
The immortality of love shines in a 
home, not when blindness shuts the eyes 
of the mother and wife, but when the 
clear-sightedness of her love reveals it- 
self in the greatness of her demands and 
expectations. It is a fable that love is 
blind : passion is often blind, but love 
never. They who love are sometimes 
blind to the faults of those for whom 
they care, but not because they love 
them. When love has its way, it grows 
more clear-sighted as it becomes deeper 
and purer. Happy is the child to whom 
the love of a mother is a noble stimulus, 
and fortunate the man whose wife stands 
not for his self-satisfaction but for his 
aspiration — a visible witness to the 
5 



Works and Days 

reality of his ideal, and unflinchingly 
loyal not only to him but to it. 

For love, being immortal, cannot rest 
in anything less than the immortal in 
another ; it craves perfection because 
perfection is the sign of imperishable- 
ness ; men gather up and carry the per- 
fect things from century to century 
because these beautiful finalities of char- 
acter, of speech, of art, of action, confirm 
its hope of immortality. He who truly 
loves is irreconcilable to faults in one 
whom he loves ; they blur the vision 
which always lies in his soul, and in 
the beauty of which his heart finds undy- 
ing freshness of devotion and joy of 
anticipation. 

The wisdom of love, which is wise in 
exact proportion to its depth and self- 
realization, is shown in its exactions 
rather than in its indulgences. The 
ministry of consolation is divinely ap- 
pointed, and love knows all its potencies ; 
but love also knows that nothing is ever 
really lost in this world except oppor- 
6 



The Highest Service of Love 

tunity ; all other losses, however bitter, 
are for the moment. With this wisdom 
in its heart, love knows that it saves 
most when it saves life for those whom 
it loves ; for life is not simple existence ; 
it is growth, and the things which come 
with growth. He loves me most who 
helps me to do and' to be the best and 
the greatest in any human relation, not 
he who says the most comforting things 
to me when death has interrupted that 
relation. That fellowship, if it was true, 
will survive the touch of death ; but if I 
have missed the heart of it by accepting 
something less than the best it had to 
offer, who shall call back the vanished 
years and restore the lost opportunity ? 
I part from my friends, but I do not 
lose them; what I lose is the growth, 
the unfolding, the task, the vision, the 
chance of love in this present hour. 

"Send some one. Lord, to love the 

best that is in me, and to accept nothing 

less from me; to touch me with the 

searching tenderness of the passion for 

7 



Works and Days 

the ideal ; to demand everything from 
me for my own sake ; to give me so 
much that I cannot think of myself, and 
to ask so much that I can keep nothing 
back ; to console me by making me 
strong before sorrow comes ; to help me 
so to live that, while I part with many 
things by the way, I lose nothing of the 
gift of life.'* 



CHARACTER AND FATE 

THERE has always been a passion- 
ate protest in the heart of the race 
against that element in life which men 
call fate ; the play upon unprotected 
natures of those events, accidents, calam- 
ities, which are beyond human control. 
These arbitrary happenings are often 
tragic in their consequences ; they often 
seem wholly irrational; they have at 
times a touch of brutal irony. In many 
cases one is tempted to personify fate as 
a malignant spirit, studiously and with 
malicious cunning seeking ways of wound- 
ing, stinging, bruising and poisoning the 
most sensitive souls. There have been 
human careers so completely distorted and 
thwarted that it has seemed as if the gods 
were jealous of men, and anxious to rob 
the greatest rewards of their sweetness and 
the noblest achievements of their fruit. 
So often are the prizes snatched from 
9 



Works and Days 

the strong hand that had grasped them 
that the Greek poets could not withdraw 
their gaze from that irony which at times 
appears to make human Hfe the mere 
sport of the higher powers. The gods 
seemed to be mocking men by holding 
out glittering gifts and then suddenly 
snatching them away. And this play of 
what appears to be blind force still has 
its way in the world. The noblest cathe- 
dral is at the mercy of the earthquake ; 
the divinest picture or poem may be 
turned to ashes in a brief quarter of an 
hour; the misplacing of a switch may 
wreck the most commanding intellect ; 
a moment's inattention may break the 
happiest circle and cloud the fairest sky. 
The conditions under which men lis^e 
have remained unchanged except as 
human foresight and skill have changed 
them ; but in that simple statement lies 
an immense change of point of view. 
There are still mysteries in the ordering 
of the world which have not been solved 
and probably are insoluble in this stage 



Character and Fate 

of development ; but we have discovered 
that nature is our friend and teacher in 
the exact degree in which we learn her 
ways and co-operate with her. The area 
of what once appeared to be mere blind 
interferences with human activity and 
happiness steadily contracts ; the area of 
beneficent and helpful relationship stead- 
ily widens. Men are now safe where 
they were once in peril ; they are now 
masters where they were once servants. 
Through what seemed the play of 
mere physical force there now shines 
the light of that great movement upward 
which we call development ; that sublime 
conception which, as one of the most 
spiritual thinkers of our generation has 
said, has come to light just in time to 
save some of the finest and most sensitive 
spirits from despair. For that conception 
not only involves a progressive order 
working in the place of what seemed to 
be a blind force ; it involves also a pro- 
gressive inclusion of all human interests 
in a system vast as the universe and old 
II 



Works and Days 

as eternity, and yet mindful of each souFs 
welfare and growth. A vision of order 
slowly becoming clearer as all things work 
together for the good of those who obey, 
throws new light on what appeared to be 
the waste and sheer brutality of the past; 
and where we do not understand, we can 
wait : since we may rest in the assurance 
that we are not the victims of a merciless 
physical order nor the sport of those who 
have power but not righteousness, the 
willingness to hurt but not the wish to 
heal. 

We are learning also that a very large 
part of the happenings and experiences 
which once seemed to come to men un- 
sought are really invited, and are only 
the outward and visible fruits of inward 
dispositions and tendencies. Human 
responsibility is very much more inclu- 
sive than it appears to be at the first 
glance, and men are far more completely 
the masters of their fate than they are 
prone to believe or confess. In fact, in 
any searching analysis, the power of what 

12 



Character and Fate 

we call fate shrinks to very small propor- 
tions. It is our habit to relieve ourselves 
of our own responsibility in small matters 
by invoking the bogy of bad luck, and 
in large matters by charging upon fate 
the ill fortune which we have brought 
upon ourselves. Many men and women 
suffer themselves to be comforted and 
deceived all their lives by these illusive 
agencies or spectres of their own making. 
The results of their own blindness, care- 
lessness, lack of judgment, neglect of 
opportunities, misleading egotism, are 
quietly and persistently put to the charge 
of luck or fate; and the self-fashioned 
sufferer takes another step in self-decep- 
tion by drugging himself with that most 
enervating of all forms of consolation, 
self-pity. Plosts of men and women go 
through their lives without once looking 
their deeds in the face or seeing them- 
selves with clear eyes. They comfort 
themselves with lies until they lose the 
power of sight ; they disown the fruits 
of their own sowing. 
13 



Works and Days 

No words have pierced this demoraliz- 
ing illusion with more searching force 
than Emerson's great phrase, " Character 
is destiny." When a man perceives that 
he is living in a world of absolute moral 
order, witnessed alike in the obediences 
and disobediences of men ; that what he 
reaps he has sown, and that he can and will 
reap nothing else ; that his career is shaped 
and framed by his own will ; that the 
great experiences which come to him for 
good or ill, for misery or blessedness, do 
not pursue him, but are invited by him ; 
that a man's spirit attracts the things 
which are congenial to it and rejects those 
which are alien — when a man perceives 
these things, he is in the way of honest 
living and of spiritual growth. Until he 
does see these facts and accept them, he 
deludes himself, and his judgment of life 
is worthless. 

Few things are more significant than 

the slow and often unconscious building 

of a home for his spirit which every man 

carries to completion. When the birds 

14 



Character and Fate 

build their nests, they have access to the 
same materials, but what different selec- 
tions they make, and how far apart their 
methods are ! Every one who comes 
into life has access to substantially the 
same material ; but each selects that 
which belongs to him. By instinct 
or by intelligence he builds his home 
with unerring adaptation to the needs 
and quality of his nature. To the pure 
all things are pure ; to the impure all 
things are impure. The unselfish con- 
struct a beautiful order of service and 
helpfulness about them ; the selfish make 
their own places. Honor and confidence 
and rectitude are in the air when the 
man of sensitive integrity appears ; sus- 
picion, mistrust and doubt pervade the 
place where the man without character 
abides. Clean and comforting thoughts 
fly to the pure in heart ; debasing fancies 
gather like foul birds around the man 
whose imagination is a home of corrup- 
tion. If we look deeply, a wonderful 
fitness reveals itself between those we 
15 



Works and Days 

know well and their several fortunes. 
Calamity may bear heavily upon them, 
but the moral world they construct for 
themselves out of the substance of their 
own natures is indestructible. Life is 
august and beautiful, or squalid and 
mean as we interpret and use it ; the 
materials are in all men's hands, and the 
selection and structure inevitably and 
infallibly disclose the character of the 
builder. As a beautiful woman furnishes 
her home until it becomes an externaliza- 
tion of her own ideals and qualities, and 
then fills it with the charm and sweetness 
of her own personality until it becomes 
a material expression of her own nature, 
so do we all silently, and for the most 
part unconsciously, form spiritual envi- 
ronments and fashion the world in which 
we live. 

There are few sublimer promises In 
the Bible than that which the words 
" Light is sown for the righteous '' con- 
vey but cannot contain. This sublime 
phrase points the way to that complete 
i6 



Character and Fate 

freedom which the human spirit craves ; 
that final emancipation from the forces 
which it does not choose and cannot con- 
trol, which marks the full maturity of 
spiritual development. It promises the 
gradual supremacy of the soul over all 
accidents, happenings, forces and mate- 
rials ; its final emancipation from all 
servitude. As life goes on, fate grows 
less and less, character grows more and 
more; the fields become more com- 
pletely our own, and yield nothing which 
we have not sown ; the correspondence 
between our spirits and our fortunes 
becomes more complete, until fate is con- 
quered by and merged into character. 
In the long run a man becomes what 
he proposes, and gains for himself what 
he really desires. We not only fashion 
our own lives, but, in a very true sense, 
as Omar Khayyam intimates, we make 
heaven or hell for ourselves. It is idle 
to talk about luck, fortune, or fate ; these 
words survive from the childhood of the 
race ; they have historical interest, but 
2 * 17 



Works and Days 

they have no moral value to-day. No one 
can hide behind them or bring them into 
court as competent witnesses on his be- 
half. It is wise to face the ultimate 
truth which must sooner or later confront 
us : we make or mar ourselves, and are 
the masters of our own fates and fortunes. 



i8 



TAKING HOLD 

THERE are thousands of men and 
women in the world who seem to 
be living under a cloud of predestined 
failure ; nothing that they touch turns 
out successfully ; the very stars in their 
courses seem to fight against them. Now, 
out of this multitude there are some who 
are facing material misfortune by the 
operation of causes which they are power- 
less to control, and to whom, therefore, 
the only success is a noble and heroic ac- 
ceptance of failure; but there are many 
more whose lack of success lies in them- 
selves. They have lost their grip on life ; 
they go through the motions of activity, 
but there is no heart in their work, no 
vim in their onset against obstacles. If 
the kingdom of heaven must be taken 
by force, much more must the earthly 
victory be won by bold, aggressive attack. 
No one can succeed who holds his work 
19 



Works and Days 

at arm's length and goes into It faint- 
hearted and presaging failure before he 
has struck the first blow. The world 
presents an apparently solid and defiant 
front to the man or woman who must 
find a place in its ranks, but it is aston- 
ishing how soon it makes room for a 
new-comer who does not sue for place 
and work, but takes both as if they be- 
longed to him. Aggressive faith in the 
success of character, aptitude, and pluck 
is contagious ; the man who has it soon 
communicates it to others ; the man who 
has it not need not expect others to create 
it for him. God appointed work for 
every earnest and self-respecting soul ; 
without work of some sort no man or 
woman can lead a respectable life in this 
world. God also appointed the rewards 
of work to follow after it as certainly as 
the harvest follows the sowing. The 
true farmer does not go into his fields 
faint-hearted and despondent, distrusting 
the march of the sun or the coming of 
the harvest ; he trusts implicitly that 
20 



Taking Hold 

ordering of the seasons which has never 
yet failed, and he knows that for every 
unfruitful year there will be a dozen 
fruitful ones. Take hold of life • in the 
same spirit ; put out of your mind all 
thought of failure, and out of your heart 
the weakness that springs from it ; strike 
boldly, and strike strongly, with full 
faith in yourself, your destiny, and God ! 



21 



LOOKING AHEAD 

THE story of the unhappy woman 
who turned back in her flight from 
destruction, and remained forever trans- 
fixed, teaches a universal lesson. There 
is no subtler temptation than that which 
prompts strong men to recall past weak- 
nesses and former transgressions and to 
surrender to the feeling of discourage- 
ment which always follows in the train of 
such recollections. The memory of 
failures and sins ought to keep us humble, 
but they ought not to weaken us : it is a 
Satanic immortality of evil which binds 
the load of remembered sins on the pil- 
grim's back so securely that neither the 
consciousness of the Divine love nor of 
genuine repentance can loosen and cast it 
off. This temptation to doubt the real- 
ity of sorrow for misdoings and of the 
infinite compassion which makes them, 
though they were scarlet, whiter than 

22 



Looking Ahead 

snow, comes to those who are best 
equipped for usefulness and most sen- 
sitive to their own shortcomings. Those 
who are really pure at heart suffer ten- 
fold for their offences, and are the easy- 
prey of the temptation which prompts 
them to turn back when their gaze should 
be forward. 

Men are slowly reversing some of 
their old and false conceptions of life, and 
among them the thought of human life 
as a continual fall from a former state of 
health and soundness, rather than as a 
possible growth out of imperfection into 
strength and purity. We do not expect 
the calyx-covered bud to breathe forth 
the sweetness of the flower, nor the flower 
to possess the ripeness of the fruit. 
Neither should we look for perfectness, 
for full and rounded symmetry, in a de- 
velopment which moves slowly, stage by 
stage, through the long education of ex- 
perience, to remote and final complete- 
ness. The golden age is behind us only 
in the heathen myths; in the Christian 
23 



Works and Days 

prophecies it always lies ahead. The 
lily is not less fair or fragrant because its 
roots are in the mud ; its saintly purity 
is the whiter because of the transforma- 
tion which it has wrought in the ele- 
ments of its life. A human character, 
full of inspiration, drawn upward by all 
the impulses of its nature when they are 
brought into harmony and educated into 
strength, is not less noble because of the 
hours of weakness through which it has 
passed. If God's promises are true, the 
stains which it feels, and which others 
perhaps remember, are no longer visible 
to One who sees all things as they are. 
The sure defence against the temptation 
to be weakened by the memory of past 
sins is to look ahead ; to feel that one's 
true life lies always in advance, and never 
behind ; that out of weakness true peni- 
tence brings strength, and out of sorrow 
there may be formed a crown of joy. 



24 



WORKING OUT 

THERE are dark hours in most 
lives, when the threads in one's 
hand fly into an apparently hopeless 
tangle, and the fair design that was 
beginning to discover itself is for the 
moment lost entirely, everything seems 
to turn to ashes, and one looks in vain 
for a ray of light to beckon him on 
through a darkness that has become im- 
penetrable. These are the hours that 
try men's souls, and test their characters 
as by fire. If one has been buoyed up 
and sustained hitherto by favoring cir- 
cumstances, his fall is almost inevitable ; 
only the man of real fibre survives the 
withdrawal of all external supports. 
And yet it is just such crises as these 
that the comprehensive experience of 
life trains men to meet. The ship on 
the stocks is built for storms, not for 
fair weather. The best, the sweetest, 
25 



Works and Days 

and the deepest things which life has 
to bestow are missed by the very few 
whom the world foolishly calls fortunate, 
who escape all storms by the way, and 
reach the end of their journey without 
knowing whether the bark they sail in 
is a thing to master angry seas or merely 
a fragile craft which has made the voyage 
by chance. 

But the darkness that surrounds men 
at times is more often apparent than 
real ; it is a gloom which comes from an 
earth-born fog, and not from the ex- 
tinction of the sun in the heavens. For 
most men there is an escape from the 
extreme sorrows of deprivation and loss ; 
an experience rarely turns out so awful 
as it was in anticipation ; in a sudden 
confusion of one's affairs there is, in 
most cases at least, a safe way out. A 
little patient waiting will often set right 
a tangle which seemed for the moment 
hopeless ; a brave heart will breast the 
storm until it has spent its fury. But 
there is another and a better way of 
26 



Working Out 

meeting one's difficulties; it is to look 
them clearly in the face, grapple with 
them resolutely, and work one's way out 
from under them. The obstacles that 
will not yield to steady work are few; 
inch by inch the greatest mountain 
ranges yield to the persistent storming 
of the drill, until an open passage is 
made through their mighty barriers for 
the use of commerce and travel. Work 
is a sovereign word in this world ; a word 
which has the quality of mastership in 
it ; a word of more magical power than 
all the old talismanic words of necro- 
mancy. If you have come to a dark 
and baffling hour in your life, if all 
things seem to conspire to bring you 
injury and loss, do not sit down in 
despair, but quietly and resolutely, one 
day at a time, set yourself to work out 
your own salvation. 



27 



SHARING SUCCESS 

WHEN one realizes what life means 
in its higher relations and duties, 
it is pathetic to notice how constantly 
people apologize to one another for any- 
small trouble which they impose. The 
young man who goes to ask the man of 
established position for a letter of in- 
troduction or for personal interest in 
securing an opportunity for work, al- 
most invariably expresses regret for the 
interruption which his request necessi- 
tates ; as if the world were wholly selfish, 
and any kind of service done to another 
were in a way exceptional and out of the 
common run of things ! That a man 
shall put his strength, his time, and his 
ability into caring for his own is taken 
for granted ; but if he is asked to do 
anything for any one else, he is thanked 
as if he were doing an unusual thing. 
As a matter of fact, the one duty is as 
28 



Sharing Success 

close, as obvious, and as imperative as 
the other. The man who throws a door 
open to one who is waiting for an 
opportunity has done nothing more ex- 
ceptional than if he had put an hour's 
work into the gaining of his own bread, 
or the clothing of his own body. He 
is simply doing what a respectable 
spiritual being might be expected to 
do. The making of opportunities, the 
throwing open of doors, is as much the 
duty of the man who has the oppor- 
tunity as caring for his own family. It 
is, indeed, one of the highest rewards 
of success — if one understands what 
success means — to be in the way 
of putting others on the same road. 
Nothing is more spiritually vulgar and 
shabby than to climb up and throw down 
the ladder by which one has climbed. 
Nothing shows the true nature of a 
man more than the spirit in which he 
treats success. if he is mean and 
niggardly in his soul, he accepts it as 
a kind of personal distinction or gift, 
29 



Works and Days 

and hoards it as a miser hoards money ; 
if he is generous, he spends it freely, 
eager that others should share what he 
has gotten. And no man deserves suc- 
cess, or ought to keep it, who fails to 
make this spiritual use of it. He who 
makes this use of it cannot be corrupted 
by any kind of success or spoiled by 
any kind of prosperity ; he who fails to 
do this was corrupted and spoiled before 
he began. 



30 



THE SMALLER VISION 

THERE are few misfortunes in life so 
blighting as the loss of the power 
of admiration. The man who can no 
longer generously and unaffectedly ad- 
mire a fine person or deed has suffered a 
loss at the very heart of his life. He 
may see a few near-at-hand and relatively 
unimportant things more clearly than his 
less critical fellows, but he has paid for 
that small access of clear vision the ter- 
rible price of loss of large vision. He 
sees the fence across the road more dis- 
tinctly than his neighbor, but rhe great 
ranges of the hills against the horizon 
are no longer visible to him. The skep- 
tical temper serves its purpose as a brake, 
but the man in whom it becomes the 
dominant temper ceases to advance ; for 
there is no propulsion in a brake. Such 
a man is fast bound in a constantly 
31 



Works and Days 

narrowing world; the springs which feed 
life are steadily drying up in him ; the 
hopes which make life rich in spite of 
its apparent poverty are slowly or swiftly 
fading from his view. He is wise about 
small things, and ignorant concerning 
great things. He so accustoms himself 
to see the small imperfections, the petty 
incongruities, that he is blind to the 
noble growth which is steadily pushing 
on through these minor and passing 
blemishes to final perfection. Such a 
man sees the wart on Cromwell's face, 
but he never for an instant sees Crom- 
well ; he is so overwhelmed by Mr. Lin- 
coln's apparent lack of seriousness that 
he utterly misses the vision of one of 
the most inspiring careers in the history 
of the world. 

The mind that becomes entirely critical 
is small without realizing its littleness, 
and is surrounded by nobler minds with- 
out comprehending them ; it is as much 
without self-knowledge as it is without 
true knowledge of others. It makes a 



The Smaller Vision 

small, mean world for itself by selecting 
the petty imperfections of the great 
growing world about it, and putting 
them into a misleading order; an order 
which it uses as the base of a still smaller 
philosophy which deals with the seams 
in the garment of creation, but ignores 
the garment. It is wise to be critical of 
ourselves, for self-criticism is a means 
of growth ; but humanity has too many 
sides to be put into the little cup of our 
individual knowledge, and the universe 
is too vast for our little measuring-rods. 
So long as there is a God, so long as 
men and women constantly rise out of 
weakness to such heights of nobility, 
and so long as Nature is clothed in such 
power and beauty, it is safer to revere 
than to judge, and wiser to admire than 
to condemn. 



33 



ON GUARD 

THE great crises and temptations of 
life come, for the most part, when 
they are least expected. So also do the 
great opportunities. A young man fancies 
that, when his great chance comes he will 
have time for special preparation, like 
the athlete who knows the date when his 
endurance will be put to the test and 
subjects himself to thorough training. 
But such opportunities are rarely given. 
There is no preparation for exceptional 
opportunities, except that which a man 
puts into his daily work; the measure 
of his hourly diligence and fidelity will 
be the measure of his preparation for the 
great moment when it comes. Not less 
suddenly and without preparation come 
our greatest temptations, and this is the 
subtlest danger that lies in wait for us. 
In one sense there is no such thing as 
34 



On Guard 

accumulation of character. It is true that 
the longer one remains pure and honest 
and true, the more steadfast and certain 
becomes the upward impulse of his na- 
ture ; but there is rarely a day when the 
whole fabric of character is not put to 
the test by some new crisis, rarely an hour 
when the yes or no, which have been 
repeated so many times, must not be 
repeated again to some question involving 
right or wrong. No man can afford to 
live on his character as he lives on the 
capital which he has acquired in business, 
and it is this conception of character 
which has betrayed many strong men. 
Paul, who belonged to the order of 
strenuous workers, and in whose life 
there was no rest from struggle, seems 
to have been constandy haunted by the 
fear that, after all the good he had done 
to others, he might himself become a 
castaway. The same peril lurks in the 
path of every man, and no past goodness 
can protect him; character can be pre- 
served only by a struggle in which there 
35 



Works and Days 

is no truce, armistice, or treaty of peace. 
Nothing but conquest, victoriously car- 
ried on till the field is cleared by the 
summons of death, can keep any man 
secure. He who falls asleep for a mo- 
ment at his post often inflicts as great an 
injury on the cause he defends as the 
most unscrupulous traitor. If vigilance 
is the price of Liberty, much more is it 
also the price of safety and character and 
righteousness. 



36 



THE REAL PREPARATION 

WHEN Wellington said that the 
Battle of Waterloo was won on 
the cricket-field at Eton, he was putting 
in a picturesque way a truth which many 
men learn too late ; the truth that the 
victories of life are won, not on the fields 
where the decisive struggle takes place, 
but in the obscure and forgotten hours 
of preparation. Success or failure lies in 
the hands of the boy long before the 
hour of final test comes. Wars are won 
in times of peace in armories, foundries, 
training schools, and at staff headquarters. 
France was conquered, a quarter of a 
century ago, before a single German sol- 
dier set foot on her soil by the parvel- 
lous preparation which had been going 
on for years under the thorough German 
military and educational system. The 
student thinks he can waste his oppor- 
37 



Works and Days 

tunities and still fit himself for the critical 
moments in his mature life by hard work 
when the hour strikes, by energetic spe- 
cial preparation when the time for action 
comes ; but specific preparation is impos- 
sible to the man who has neglected gen- 
eral preparation. Knowledge cannot be 
picked up on short notice except by the 
man whose mind is already well stocked ; 
a particular skill can be rapidly acquired 
only by^. the man who has thoroughly 
trained all his faculties. The thoroughly 
educated lawyer, with the power of atten- 
tion and concentration which are among 
the best results of a genuine education, 
can readily familiarize himself with a new 
field of knowledge for a special use ; but 
the half-educated man is unable to grasp, 
arrange, or command the facts. It is 
often said of speakers that they are un- 
usually eloquent when called upon so 
suddenly as to be shut oflF from all possi- 
bility of preparation ; and such speeches 
are called extempore, as if the word in- 
volved lack of preparation. It is safe to 
38 



The Real Preparation 

say that no man ever yet made a really 
good speech who had not made long, 
thorough, and painstaking preparation ; 
not specific preparation for the particular 
occasion, but general preparation for all 
occasions. It is the thoroughly trained 
man who shines when he is suddenly 
called upon ; under the pressure of the 
moment all his faculties come to his 
assistance, and into fifteen minutes of talk 
he condenses the thinking of months or 
years. Tap an empty man and you vv^ill 
get nothing ; tap a full man and you 
will get the best there is in him. 

In the higher fields of success there are 
no accidents ; men reap precisely what 
they have sown, and nothing else ; they 
do well precisely what they have pre- 
pared to do, and they do nothing else 
well. This preparation is often uncon- 
scious, but it is not the less thorough for 
that reason. In fact, the larger and 
deeper part of preparation for the greater 
experiences and works of life is always 
unconscious. The cricketers in the fiield 
39 



Works and Days 

at the English public school did not 
know that they were fighting and win- 
ning one of the decisive battles of history ; 
we do not know when we are making 
ourselves strong, rich, and great in re- 
source and character. The world puts 
its force into us when we put ourselves 
in right relation to it ; experience makes 
us constantly wiser if we know how to 
rationalize it ; time deposits all manner 
of treasure in our memory and imagina- 
tion if we hold the doors open. Nothing 
is lost upon a man who is bent upon 
growth ; nothing wasted on one who is 
always preparing for his work and his 
life by keeping eyes, mind, and heart 
open to nature, men, books, experience. 
Such a man finds ministers to his educa- 
tion on all sides ; everything co-operates 
with his passion for growth. And what 
he gathers serves him at unexpected 
moments, in unforeseen ways. All things 
that he has seen, heard, known, and felt 
come to his aid in the critical moment to 

make his thought clear and deep, his 
40 



The Real Preparation 

illustration luminous, his speech eloquent 
and inspiring. " The poet, the orator," 
says Emerson, who was a man of this 
order, " bred in the woods, whose senses 
have been nourished by their fair and 
appeasing changes, year after year, with- 
out design and without heed, — shall 
not lose their lessons altogether in the 
roar of cities or the broil of politics. 
Long hereafter, amid agitation and terror 
in national councils, — in the hour of 
revolution, — these solemn images shall 
reappear in their morning lustre, as fit 
symbols and words of the thoughts which 
the passing events shall awaken. At the 
call of a noble sentiment, again the woods 
wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls 
and shines, and the cattle low upon the 
mountains, as he saw and heard them in 
his infancy. And with these forms the 
spells of persuasion, the keys of power, 
are put into his hands." 



41 



THE LIGHT OF FAITH 

IF there were to be a new beatitude, it 
might well read, " Blessed are the 
cheerful ; " for to them is given the gift 
of diffusing hope and courage and joy. 
It is not too much to say that they are 
not only light, but life bringers ; for 
courage and joy prolong life, as discour- 
agement and despair shorten it. Plants 
dwindle and die without the sun, and 
men grow old and perish without the 
warmth and cheer of hope and courage. 
If these qualities were purely tempera- 
mental, those who lacked them could not 
hope to possess them ; but cheerfulness 
is not only inheritable, it may be culti- 
vated. A cheerful face is the outward and 
visible sign of an inward condition, and 
that condition may be secured by any one 
who is willing to pay the price of effort 
and steady purpose which the acquisition 
of any virtue exacts. It is as easy to 
42 



The Light of Faith 

cultivate cheerfuhiess as to cultivate pa- 
tience or good temper or courtesy. 
These qualities society demands of every 
man, and if nature has not bestowed 
them on him, society insists that he shall 
cultivate them. The bad-tempered and 
discourteous person finds himself living 
in an ever-widening zone of silence and 
solitude ; people do not care for his 
society, and are eager to give him exclu- 
sive enjoyment of it. In like manner, 
society ought to demand cheerfulness of 
all its members ; the man who spreads 
depression and breeds discouragement 
ought to be ostracized, because he strikes 
at the very heart of the social life. De- 
pression and despair are pre-eminently 
unsocial vices ; and in so far as they are 
diffused, they sap social courage and 
drain the fountains of social happiness. 

The depressed man, whose spirit kills 
joy and makes gloom contagious, owes 
it to his fellows to keep despair to him- 
self, as a man suffering from a contagious 
disease owes it to society to keep his fel- 
43 



Works and Days 

lows free from danger. This often in- 
volves inconveniences and hardship, but 
inconveniences and hardship must be 
borne when the good of society is at 
stake. Sorrow longs for companionship, 
and ought never to be denied it ; but 
sorrow and the pessimistic temper have 
nothing in common. Some of the most 
beautiful examples of cheerfulness which 
society has known have been furnished by 
those whose sorrows were more than their 
joys. Men need hope and courage for 
the power of growth and the peace of 
spirit which these noble qualities bring 
with them ; and cheerfulness is, there- 
fore, a duty which every man owes to 
his fellows. For cheerfulness and de- 
spondency are aHke contagious. A dis- 
couraged leader can chill the bravest 
army ever put in the field ; a buoyant 
leader can put resolution into cowards. 
The roots of cheerfulness are in faith ; 
the hope which shines on the faces of 
some men and women is the reflection of 
the light which shines in the face of God. 
44 



MORAL USES OF MEMORY 

THERE are many facts which indi- 
cate that nothing ever escapes the 
memory ; that while the power of recol- 
lection may fail from time to time, the 
record, once made, although it becomes 
invisible, is made forever. It is probably 
inaccurate to say that a man ever loses 
faculty of memory ; even those whose 
memories are impaired, in moments of 
great excitement recall vividly and de- 
scribe accurately things which they were 
supposed to have forgotten. Every 
man keeps within himself an indestruc- 
tible record of his own life. He may 
cease to be able to read it for a time, 
but this loss of power is apparently only 
for a time. The light of vitality may 
sink so low that the words written on the 
tablet of the heart become illegible, but 
when that light flashes up again they are 
45 



Works and Days 

once more distinct. If this be true, 
not only is the unity of life assured and 
the integrity of personality preserved, 
but every man carries with him the ex- 
planation of his own career and the 
record of his own destiny. There is 
something terrible and at the same time 
sublime in the text, " Thou shalt remem- 
ber all the way which the Lord thy God 
hath led thee." When one comes to 
remember the things he would like to 
forget, the memory takes on the guise 
of an inexorable judge. It is, however, 
an unflinching friend. If it were possi- 
ble to forget one's sins and blunders, 
the faculty of moral growth would be 
arrested. If one could go out of the old 
year into the new and carry nothing with 
him but the memory of agreeable things, 
without the consciousness of the failures, 
indulgences and weaknesses of the year, 
there would be neither the tonic of re- 
pentance nor the spur to better living. 
Our past is not bound to us as the ball 
is chained to the criminal, to keep us in 
46 



Moral Uses of Memory 

a place of punishment ; it is given to 
us to remind us that the only moral 
safety is in moral progress, and that the 
man who has made a moral mistake or 
committed a sin can never be sure of his 
safety until he has removed himself as 
far as possible from the scene and occa- 
sion of his weakness. The best thing 
about the memory of our evil deeds is 
the horror they give us of all associations 
with them, and the desire they create in 
us to remove ourselves from them as far 
as the ends of the earth. The best edu- 
cation of a year may not come from the 
things which seem happy in it, but from 
those which brought us at the moment 
the greatest unhappiness. There is no 
way of deciding what is spiritually fortu- 
nate or unfortunate at the time ; our 
most grievous calamities are often seen 
later to have borne the fruit of greatest 
happiness, and what appeared to be at 
the moment our largest prosperities have 
turned later to ashes in our hands. The 
final value of every experience depends 
47 



Works and Days 

upon its spiritual result. No one can 
tell what seed is in the soil until the har- 
vest is borne ; the seed of apparent bitter- 
ness often brings forth the flowers of 
peace. 



48 



PAGAN WORDS 

THERE are two words which ought 
never to be heard by children — 
" luck " and " chance ; " the two verbal 
scapegoats on which are laid half the sins 
and follies of the race. If there is any- 
thing which is essential to the moral 
health and strength of a boy or girl, it is 
to plant deep in the consciousness the 
fact that this is an ordered world ; that a 
man reaps that which he sows; that he 
secures the rewards for which he is willing 
to make the effort, and gains the prizes 
for which he is willing to pay the price in 
labor, self-denial, and strength. It is true 
that there are cases in which force of cir- 
cumstances seem to make it impossible 
for a man to attain the specific end for 
which he sets out. In these cases, how- 
ever, it is often obviously better that he 
should fail than that he should succeed ; 
4 49 



Works and Days 

for it often appears, from a later and more 
far-reaching point of view, that temporary 
failure meant ultimate success, and that in 
missing some one thing on which a man 
had set his heart he finally gained some- 
thing of far greater value. What is cer- 
tain in this uncertain world is that no 
real success is ever achieved by accident, 
chance, or luck; that is to say, by a blind 
and brutal play of forces or influences, 
or by a meaningless combination of con- 
ditions. What appears to be a wanton 
interference with human plans by a play 
of blind force is often seen, in the larger 
circuit of time, to have been the intro- 
duction of a new and higher purpose. 
Athens lost the political independence 
upon the preservation of which the 
greatest of her orators had set his heart, 
but in parting with formal independence 
she became sharer in a movement which 
spread her spirit to the ends of the earth. 
In all those cases, therefore, in which 
on first appearance it would seem as if a 
man's fate had been taken out of his 
50 



Pagan Words 

hands, or his dearest purposes defeated, 
it is well to postpone judgment until the 
full evolution of the movement is seen. 
In any case, it is the height of folly to 
instil into the mind the idea that a man 
is the play of chance winds of destiny and 
not the master of his own fortune. Spir- 
itually, at least, every man shapes his 
own life. The things which come to him 
are the things for which he has prepared 
himself; the things which he misses are 
the things which he has voluntarily re- 
jected. If he fails, it is because he lacks 
abiUty, force, skill, or judgment for the 
specific thing which he set out to do ; if 
he succeeds, it is because he has the 
quality which commands success. If he 
is a man who has taught himself to be 
honest with himself, he never for a mo- 
ment loses sight of his own fundamental 
responsibility. He does not permit him- 
self the delusion that life has cheated 
him ; that he has failed because conditions 
were adverse, or because some one else 
did not give him the support which he 
51 



Works and Days 

ought to have had. The men who are 
always making excuses for themselves, 
and laying upon others the responsibility 
for their own blunders, follies, and failures 
are rarely honest ; they either deceive 
themselves or they evade a full, clear 
recognition of the facts. The beginning 
of education is the acceptance of the law 
that a man reaps what he sows, that he 
is responsible for his own career, and 
that it is idle to attempt to blind one's 
eyes to these fundamental facts or to 
shift the responsibility of one*s failures 
to other people's shoulders. 



52 



THE LESSON OF LIFE 

THE fundamental problem of life for 
every man and woman born into 
the world is very simple : it is to har- 
monize our wills with the will of God. 
The problem is simple, but the method 
of working it out is perplexing, painful, 
often agonizing. In order to do the 
will of God we must first find out what 
that will is, and this is a task which is 
sometimes so difficult that men give it 
up in despair. In the very earnestness 
with which they strive to know where 
God would lead them and what he 
would have them do they often bring 
their wills into conformity with his will 
without being conscious that what they 
sought has been found. 

This is the real problem in all depart- 
ments of life. In society a man must 
bring his desires and purposes into some 
53 



Works and Days 

kind of harmony with the rights and 
pleasures of all other men. In the State 
a man must conform his methods and 
his aims to the methods and aims which 
have been incorporated into law and 
political organization : if he does not do 
this, he becomes a law-breaker, a criminal, 
and an outcast. The great tragedies 
are the stories of men and women 
who have opposed their individual wills 
to the will of the State and have been 
crushed in the unequal combat. In 
those cases in which the State is or- 
ganized or conducted in opposition to 
those laws of righteousness which are 
the expressed will of God, the State 
itself becomes the victim of the wilful 
or ignorant assertion of its own will. In 
the church a man conforms to the con- 
ditions under which all common religious 
effort must be organized and all common 
worship held. If men were to assert 
their own will in all the non-essential 
as well as in all the essential points of 
doctrine and worship, there would be 
54 



The Lesson of Life 

as many sects as there are persons, and 
a church of any kind would be impos- 
sible. In the family the individual 
preference, desire, and ambition must 
be harmonized, or the beauty and sanc- 
tity of the home are ruthlessly and often 
brutally destroyed. It is the assertion 
of raw, crude, selfish individuality which 
wrecks so many families, breeds the 
scandal of easy and frequent divorce, 
and fills the newspapers with vulgar 
stories of infidelity, recrimination, and 
separation. 

These tragedies of public, religious, 
and family life have their roots in the 
refusal of men to conform to the will of 
God and learn the lessons which he has 
set the family, the Church, and the 
State to teach. It is only the ignorant 
man who believes that freedom is to be 
found in self-assertion, that happiness 
lies in having one's way in the face of 
law, that the individual will can prevail 
against the will of the Infinite. He who 
has learned the elementary lessons of 
55 



Works and Days 

life has discovered that it is sheer mad- 
ness to run amuck through the manifold 
and divinely ordered laws with which 
life is encompassed and by which it is 
protected. History presents many such 
figures, running with flaming torch or 
drawn sword through the crowded high- 
ways of society, inflicting dangerous 
wounds and destroying things of price- 
less value which lie in their paths, but 
doomed from the beginning to final and 
disastrous failure. This universe is not 
a chaos ; although there is freedom of 
choice in it, no man breaks its laws and 
escapes the penalty. A man may wreck 
himself if he will ; he cannot wreck 
God. 

To refuse to conform to the law and 
order of the world is a sign, therefore, 
not of strength but of ignorance. The 
violent oppose, resist, storm, and hurl 
themselves to death against impassable 
barriers ; the strong study, observe, 
learn, and accept. The violent, mis- 
taking lawlessness for freedom, rush on 
56 



The Lesson of Life 

to useless and barren death ; the strong, 
by submission to a greater wisdom, 
pass through obedience to Hberty. The 
strongest and most victorious figure in 
history is Christ ; but among all men 
who have lived none ever so completely 
submitted his will to the will of the 
Father. In submission and resistance 
lie the fortunes and fates of men. The 
egotists — the raw, crude natures who 
refuse to be educated — struggle, harden 
themselves, persist in opposition, refuse 
to be led, and are either crushed by the 
tremendous forces against which they 
oppose their puny strength, or are left 
sterile, non-productive, bitter, and un- 
comprehending — solitary figures in a 
world in which men are happy and 
free only in fellowship. The wise bear 
the burdens, perform the tasks, submit 
to the sorrows of life, because they 
believe that there is a wisdom above 
their own, and that that wisdom is not 
only knowledge but love. They wait 
upon God in order that they may learn 
57 



Works and Days 

what he would have them do ; and they 
are taught by all the happenings of life, 
fertilized rather than embittered by its 
sorrows, and gradually led into the pos- 
session of freedom and power. 



58 



TRUE SELF-CONFIDENCE 

THERE is something pathetic in the 
inability which prevents a great 
many men from believing in the best 
that is in them. There seems to be, if 
not an active, at least a passive, con- 
sciousness of infirmity and weakness 
which brings with it, for most men, 
not only spiritual modesty, but a self- 
distrust which stands in the way of their 
highest growth. This consciousness of 
weakness and infirmity is, in its place, 
one of the signs of the kinship of the 
human race with God ; for the sense of 
imperfection always carries with it the 
conception of perfection. No man can 
realize how far he falls short of the mark 
unless he sees the mark clearly. Deep 
in the heart of the human race there is a 
profound belief in the higher possibilities 
of its spiritual development, and this be- 
lief is evidenced by the shrinking which 
59 



Works and Days 

prevents a great many men from taking 
that faith to themselves. This diffidence 
or self-distrustj however valuable as an 
element of growth, if it becomes domi- 
nant, is destructive of the power of 
growth. Faith may be accompanied by 
great consciousness of weakness, but it 
ought to bear its fruit in unlimited belief 
in the power to overcome weakness. 
Hosts of people miss the best things in 
life because they do not sufficiently strive 
for them. They believe abstractly in the 
possibility of obtaining them, but they 
do not believe that they are individually 
capable of achieving these best things ; 
they see the stars clearly, but through 
self-distrust they are unable to follow 
Emerson's maxim and hitch their wagons 
to these shining points. This is not the 
mood of those who think or feel or do 
great things. Men rise above themselves 
— that is to say, become inspired — by 
putting aside their weakness and trusting 
to their strength, verifying those noble 
lines of Lowell : 

60 



True Self-Confidence 

Those love truth best who to themselves are true. 
And what they dare to dream of, dare to do. 

As the earth is a great battery of force 
which men are just learning how to use, 
and which is to add immeasurably to 
the working power of the world as it 
becomes utilized, so the universe is 
filled with tides of spiritual vitality, 
upon which men can draw, and will draw, 
when they come to believe in and realize 
that these sources of strength are open to 
them. If humanity, as a whole, would 
believe practically in its ability to live 
the highest life and to do the greatest 
things to-morrow, society would be re- 
generated, and there would come an age 
of creativeness the like of which the 
world has never known. For creative- 
ness is largely a matter of attitude. God 
comes to those who wait ; great thoughts 
are in the air for those who are open- 
minded ; noble impulses crowd the high- 
ways for those who are ready to receive 
and act upon them. Life is common- 
place very largely because men do not 
6i 



Works and Days 

put themselves in the way of becoming 
poets and creators. They are willing to 
remain mechanical when they might have 
the spirit and the soul of the artist; they 
are content to imitate when they might 
fashion their own souls with their own 
hands. Not all men can be great, but 
every man can enter into the atmos- 
phere of greatness and gain Its vision ; 
it Is simply a question of believing in 
the best things and In our power to at- 
tain them. 



62 



UNUSED POWER 

ONE of the most interesting things 
in life is the unexpected develop- 
ment of power which sometimes takes 
place in people who have before shown 
little or no promise of exceptional energy 
or ability. This development is some- 
times as great a surprise to the man in 
whom it takes place as to his friends. 
He awakes to find himself in possession 
of a force the presence of which, even in 
the germ, he did not suspect. What 
happens in such a case is not the sudden 
appearance in a man's nature of some- 
thing which was not there before ; it is 
the sudden disclosure of something which 
has hitherto been concealed. Men do 
not begin life fully developed. Occa- 
sionally a man appears who is as mature 
at twenty-five as at sixty, but this rarely 
happens, and when it does happen it is a 
distinct limitation. Young men, as a 
63 



Works and Days 

rule, are bundles of undeveloped possi- 
bilities. They grow by putting forth their 
strength ; and the fulness and symmetry 
of their unfolding depend largely upon 
the completeness with which they give 
out what is in them. When a man sud- 
denly discloses a power the presence of 
which he did not suspect, he is simply 
putting forth what was always in him. 
He has created nothing new, he has taken 
nothing in from without ; he has simply 
used his own. 

It is probably true that the great ma- 
jority of men never fully realize their 
own powers, because they never com- 
pletely put them forth. Society is full of 
undeveloped, or partially developed per- 
sonalities, — men who have possibilities 
to which they have not given full expres- 
sion, powers which they have not thor- 
oughly trained, capacities which they 
have not adequately recognized. It is 
true that some men overwork ; that is to 
say, they do one thing too continuously, 
or they do many things without adequate 
64 



Unused Power 

refreshment and variety ; but very few 
men work at the top of their power. 
Very few men completely unfold all that 
is in them. As the earth is full of trea- 
sures of all kinds, the existence of which 
is not suspected in many localities, and 
which are presently to bring private for- 
tunes and general prosperity to those 
localities, so there are men and women 
the world over who are rich in power 
of the highest kind, but who have no 
suspicion of the fact because they have 
never given themselves full development 
through activity. More men and women 
fail by reason of under-estimation of their 
power than by reason of over-valuation. 
As a rule, people of conscience do not 
take themselves at an adequate valuation ; 
they do not believe enough in themselves. 
If they believed more in their own re- 
sources, they would make more out of 
their lives. It is astonishing how out- 
ward circumstances will sometimes evolve 
unsuspected energy from a man who has 
heretofore been regarded as essentially 
5 65 



Works and Days 

commonplace by his neighbors and by 
himself. When such a man feels the 
pressure of conditions, he often awakes 
to the possession of a power which re- 
sponds quickly and adequately to a call 
from without. Every great crisis calls, 
and does not call in vain, for energy, self- 
sacrifice, and genius ; but these things 
ought to come to light by virtue of 
inward impulse ; they ought not to de- 
pend on outward conditions. A man 
ought to put forth all that is in him as a 
matter of loyalty to himself and of conse- 
cration to his fellows. He ought to lead 
in the evolution of spiritual energy rather 
than allow himself to be dependent on 
some bugle-call from without. To be- 
lieve in ourselves in the sense of regard- 
ing ourselves as full of the germs of 
growth is not only to secure the highest 
growth, but it is to render the finest ser- 
vice which a man can render to his fel- 
lows. 



66 



THE POSITIVE LIFE 

THERE are two general lines of 
action in dealing with life, the 
negative and the positive. A great 
many people approach the experiences 
of life and its opportunities from the 
negative side and are fairly successful; 
though the great majority of them fail 
to achieve any distinct character or make 
any lasting mark. To approach life 
from the negative side is to wait on op- 
portunity, to take what the day brings, 
to adjust ourselves with constant self- 
repression to the opinions and wishes 
of others, to fall in with the movement 
of events, and to get the impetus which 
comes from the current. Many attain 
a certain kind of external success along 
this line. They have many well-wishers, 
if few warm friends ; they are often 
popular, even if they are not greatly 
respected; they are sought after even 
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Works and Days 

when they are not honored, and the 
external appearance of success conceals 
to a certain extent the fact of failure. 
To this class belong all the merely 
politic opportunists ; those who are 
made by conditions and advanced by 
circumstances, who are lifted on general 
movements and carried into port by fair 
winds. To this class belonged Lord 
Godolphin, of whom Charles II. once 
said, with characteristic wit, that he was 
" never in the way and never out of it." 
This kind of living involves constant 
watchfulness of others and intense stu- 
diousness of conditions. The man who 
has neither steam nor sails must watch 
the currents very closely and keep his 
eye constantly on the tides. The wear 
and tear of constant adjustment to the 
wishes of the community and to fortu- 
nate conditions are never relaxed in the 
case of the opportunist. He can never 
afford to make mistakes of judgment : 
his success depends upon doing the 
politic thing at the right moment, saying 
68 



The Positive Life 

the persuasive word at the proper point, 
and putting himself in the way at the 
exact second when he may be noticed or 
needed. He who studies popular favor 
in public life must needs have a quick 
eye and a long memory ; he must culti- 
vate agility of motion, rapidity of 
thought, and skill in transferring his 
principles from side to side without too 
obvious inconsistency. This life, which 
seems easier, is much the hardest, because 
it lacks entirely that repose which comes 
from resting on principle, and that con- 
stant nourishment of the inward spirit 
which flows from harmony with the 
deeper laws of life. 

Dealing with the positive side of life, 
on the other hand, involves a certain 
indifference to the conditions of the mo- 
ment ; the indifference, not of contempt, 
but of preoccupation with higher things ; 
a certain lack of care for the opinions of 
others, not from selfishness or coldness, 
but because one*s opinions are formed on 
a different basis. The man who actively 
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Works and Days 

and positively fashions his own career 
and develops his own character has an 
inward purpose, an unseen aim, to which 
he constantly directs his attention. He 
may be a long time in forming this pur- 
pose or in perfectly discerning this aim, 
but when these ultimate ends are once 
clear to him he is forever rid of all un- 
certainty. Winds and storms are in a 
certain sense matters of as little conse- 
quence to him as to the great ocean 
steamers which sail to their havens with 
sublime disregard of all external circum- 
stances ; they are set to a course, and 
nothing drives them out of that course. 
In like manner he who shapes his course 
to a distant and clearly defined point is 
not swept out of it by passing winds of 
popular favor or disfavor, or by chang- 
ing currents of popular opinion. Hav- 
ing an inward purpose, his relations with 
men form themselves on a natural and 
spiritual basis. He does not need to 
weigh men according to their value for 

his own uses ; he is not looking to them 

70 



The Positive Life 

for the development of his own career. 
What he wants from them are the things 
which he is willing to give them — affec- 
tion, sympathy, interest, and co-opera- 
tion. He is not bent upon using them 
simply as aids ; they do not work into 
his plan of life. He is lifted above all 
those sordid and selfish relationships in 
which a man entangles himself when he 
attempts to use friends to forward his 
own ends. 

Nor need the man of inward purpose 
concern himself with consistency of life. 
There is nothing more beautiful than the 
reaction of a high ideal upon the actions 
of the man or woman who cherishes it; 
for an ideal steadily pursued sooner or 
later shapes a constant and harmonious 
character, and we come at last to know 
what the ideals of men are by the char- 
acter which those ideals have formed. 
Nothing is so fundamental in creating a 
real and noble personality as the choice 
of a high ideal ; let a man choose such 
an ideal and follow it loyally and he may 
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Works and Days 

give up all concern for his character ; it 
will form itself. Such a man is emanci- 
pated, not only from the temptation to 
be selfish in his friendship, but from 
most of the fears that beset men of less 
clearness of purpose. Such a man is 
much less affected by the happenings of 
outward fortune, by material disaster of 
every kind, than a man who has not this 
inward guidance and constant pressure 
of the ideal upon his own nature. He 
is emancipated from fear of men because 
men can neither make nor mar his 
career; he is emancipated from fear of 
disaster because conditions can neither 
make nor mar his career ; his only 
source of fear is disloyalty to his own 
purpose, and that is a fear which guards 
and protects rather than depresses. 
Such a man discards, one by one, all 
those things which belittle human life 
and fill it with weakening and corroding 
anxieties. He is not disturbed by the 
confusion of aims which he finds in the 
world about him ; he is not concerned 
72 



The Positive Life 

about his enemies, for he has none whom 
he has consciously made ; he thinks gen- 
erously and fearlessly of his friends, and 
he is lifted above all the outward changes 
of fortune by the spirituality of the end 
which he has chosen. 



73 



WHICH BACKGROUND? 

IN the work of an artistic temperament 
it is easy to discover the background 
against which that work is done, because 
the background of the life of a sensitive 
man leaves its impress upon his imagina- 
tion. Wordsworth's poetry is touched 
throughout with the elusive and mysteri- 
ous beauty of the Lake region, and 
Scott's verse with the loveliness of that 
wild and beautiful scenery which he knew 
so well along the banks of the Tweed 
and among the southern Scottish lakes ; 
again and again one hears in Tennyson's 
verse the roar of the sea along the coast 
of Lincolnshire, and one sees in the back- 
ground of many of Titian's pictures those 
mountain forms with which his youth 
was familiar. Ruskin has described In 
one of his most eloquent passages the 
loveliness of sky and sea which enveloped 
74 



Which Background? 

the young imagination of Giorgione and 
gave his work its penetrating splendor. 

It is not within the power of every 
man to choose his background. Some 
men are born far from the majesty of 
mountains and the glory of the sea. It 
is impossible for some men to select their 
surroundings ; but there is another back- 
ground than that of material forms, as 
there is another expression of a man's 
spirit than that of tangible work : there 
is a background of thought and there is 
a life of the mind. Those who have 
spiritual or literary insight are able to 
discern in a man's thought the back- 
ground of his spiritual life ; they know, 
if they have penetration, what images 
and ideals he sees in the hours when his 
mind is free and he lives in himself rather 
than in the expression of himself One 
knows without being told what ideas 
were in the mind of Emerson when he 
gave free rein to his thought, and it is 
not difficult to imagine what kind of 
images thrilled Carlyle in those lonely 
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Works and Days 

walks in the days -when " Sartor Resar- 
tus" was being written. Great spirits 
dwell habitually with great ideas ; these 
ideas are their chosen companions, the 
intimate friends of leisure hours; it is by 
contact with such ideas that the springs 
of inspiration are fed when they have 
been drawn upon ; it is in the fellowship 
of such ideas that the ideals of life are 
purified when they have been tarnished. 
The deepest and richest part of a man's 
life is unconscious. A great deal of his 
most fruitful thinking goes on without 
his direction, and when he is not aware 
that his mind is at work. The greatness 
of his nature and the value of his thought 
will depend largely upon what the mind 
does when he is not consciously directing 
it; will depend, in other words, on the 
ideas, the fundamental principles, the 
absorbing problems to which it reverts 
by instinct, by habit, and by affinity when 
it is free to select its own objects. These 
are its background. No man can conceal 
himself; no man can hide the background 
76 



Which Background? 

of his mind, and that background is of 
his own choosing. It Hes in the power 
of each of us to Hve with the greatest 
ideas, the noblest ideals, the most in- 
spiring achievements in the history of 
man, or to content ourselves with the 
mediocrities, the commonplaces, and the 
vulgarities of our time. 



77 



THE PRAYER OF LOVE 

THERE is a beautiful and signifi- 
cant phrase in one of the Maxims 
of Ani which is as full of meaning as it 
was when it was written, probably thirty- 
live hundred years ago. " What the 
sanctuary of God detests," wrote the 
wise Egyptian, " are noisy feasts ; if thou 
implorest Him with a loving heart, . . . 
He will do thy affairs." There are as 
many forms of prayer as there are peti- 
tioners, and every form which is a natural 
and sincere expression of the love, the 
gratitude, the praise, the worship, or the 
need of a human spirit is good and 
acceptable. Men not only pray in as 
many languages as they speak, but every 
man prays in a language of his own ; and 
God understands them all. For men 
use speech because they know so little of 
one another and must put thought or 
78 



The Prayer of Love 

feeling into words if they would make 
either comprehensible ; but God under- 
stands all before we speak, and our un- 
uttered prayers are as audible to him as 
those which we put into words. 

Indeed, the value of the spoken prayer 
depends entirely on the prayer which 
rises to God without passing through 
the mist of words ; the prayer which 
rises out of the deeps of our own natures, 
and which is the only true and complete 
expression of our spirits. Words are 
idle unless there is a thought which fills 
them to their full capacity. Nothing is 
so valueless as speech which has no roots 
in character ; nothing more noble than 
great speech when it is the unforced 
utterance of a great faith, a great con- 
viction, or a great purpose. Spoken 
prayer is not only profitless but profane 
when it is touched with perfunctoriness, 
indifference, or formalism ; it is unspeak- 
ably holy when it is to the silent petition 
of the whole nature and life what the 
few drops flung from the river into the 
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Works and Days 

sunlight and shining there a brief mo- 
ment are to the deep and quiet stream 
from which they are taken. 

Every Hfe is an invocation to the best 
or the worst ; an invitation to good or to 
evil; a petition to God for forgiveness 
and help or an unuttered profanity. 
The more pure and beautiful the nature, 
the more sincere and noble the unspoken 
appeal which it makes. Every person of 
any sensitiveness has often felt this silent 
invocation of a rare and beautiful spirit. 
There are little children whose innocence 
touches us with such compassionate- 
ness that we long to take them in our 
arms and bear them beyond the reach 
of harm and pollution ; there are women 
of such fineness of character, such ex- 
quisite harmony of nature, that we are 
filled with a passionate longing to shield 
them from care and calamity ; there 
are generous and noble-hearted men for 
whom we long to clear the way, that all 
their rich possibilities may be brought to 
beautiful fruition. A fine, high, aspir- 
80 



The Prayer of Love 

ing nature always makes an appeal to us, 
utters an unspoken prayer of which it is 
unconscious but which is a complete ex- 
pression and revelation of its secret hopes 
and loves. 

If these silent appeals come to us as 
the fragrance steals from the flower by 
the diffusive quality of its own sweetness, 
how much more direct and powerful 
must be their appeal to One whose his- 
tory, so far as it is written in human 
records, is the history of a love which 
seeks the lost before the lost know that 
they are lost, and gives its life before the 
need of that divine sacrifice is feh r And 
what appeal can reach the Infinite Love 
so swiftly as the prayer of a loving heart; 
the unconscious and unspoken longing 
of those who love for a return of that 
which they are always giving ? For 
God is not afar off; he is nearer to us 
than those whose voices we hear and 
whose hands we touch. The pure and 
loving are always in his presence; they 
do not need to speak ; he understands 
6 8i 



Works and Days 

without words ; he knows all things, but 
he must know best the hearts that love, 
for they are nearest him, not only in 
place, but in nature. Between him and 
them there is a fellowship which is deeper 
and greater than speech ; a fellowship 
which rests on foundations that are deeper 
than human consciousness. He has been 
always coming to them, and they are always 
drawing nearer to him. The prayer of a 
loving heart is a prayer which is granted 
before it is spoken ; for God is love, 
and love goes to its own by a divine im- 
pulsion. The prayers of those that 
love, like the fragrance of the flowers, 
are the deep breathings of the soul, and 
the answering love of God is the atmos- 
phere in which they exhale. The secret 
of prayer is not insistence ; it is sharing 
the divine nature. They who love pray 
unceasingly, and unceasingly God an- 



swers 



them. 



82 



PERSONAL ATMOSPHERE 

IN this country emphasis is continually 
laid upon action, as if action were 
the only expression of character. Now, 
action is in the last degree important, 
because character cannot be formed with- 
out it. It is through action that strength 
comes ; it is by action that the inchoate 
possibilities of a nature are rounded, har- 
monized, and solidified into a harmonious 
and developed individuality. But every 
action must have its reaction upon the 
nature of the man who puts it forth ; if 
it does not, it fails of that which is, for 
him, its highest result ; for the finest ex- 
pression of a man's nature is not to be 
found in his action, but in that very 
intangible thing which we call his atmos- 
phere. There are a great many people 
who are alert, energetic, and decisive, but 
who give forth very little of this rare and 
spiritual efHuence — this quality which 
S3 



Works and Days 

seems to issue out of the very recesses 
of one's nature. It is, however, through 
this quaHty that the most constant in- 
fluence is exercised ; that influence which 
is not only put forth most steadily, but 
which penetrates and aflTects others in the 
most searching way. The air we breathe 
has much to do with health ; in a relax- 
ing atmosphere it is difficult to work ; in 
an atmosphere of vitality it is easy to 
work. Men are stimulated or depressed 
by the air they breathe ; in like manner, 
and as unconsciously, we are stimulated 
or depressed by the atmosphere which 
envelops those with whom we associate. 
We never meet some men without going 
away from them with our ideals a little 
blurred or our faith in them a little dis- 
turbed ; we can never part from others 
without a sense of increased hope. There 
are men who invigorate us by simple con- 
tact ; something escapes from them of 
which they are not aware, and which we 
cannot analyze, which makes us believe 
more deeply in ourselves and our kind. 
84 



Personal Atmosphere 

So far as charm is concerned, there is 
no quality which contributes so much to 
it as the subtle thing we call atmosphere. 
There are some women who do not need 
to speak in order not only to awaken 
our respect, but to give us a sense of 
something rare and fine. In such an in- 
fluence all that is most individual and 
characteristic flows together, and the 
woman reveals herself without being con- 
scious that she is making herself known. 
Such an atmosphere in a home creates a 
sentiment and organizes a life which 
would not be possible if one should at- 
tempt to fashion these things by inten- 
tion. The finest things, like happiness, 
must be sought by indirection, and are 
the results of character rather than ob- 
jects of immediate pursuit. 

A man may be always less or greater 
than his surroundings. The key of the 
play for the imagination is not the stage 
setting, but the actor ; the audience which 
saw the first rendering of " Lear " or 
" Hamlet," with their bare surroundings 
85 



Works and Days 

and their lack of scenic effects, may have 
been far more profoundly stirred than 
many modern audiences which are as- 
sailed through every sense, but whose 
imagination is often entirely untouched. 
Nothing really moves us until a man 
speaks, and then we are on fire. This 
is what Emerson meant when he said, 
" The day is always his who works in 
it with serenity and great aims." Men 
are in society, not to accept things as 
they find them and to conform to the 
standards of those about them, but to 
create and impress their own standards ; 
to carry their own atmosphere with 
them. It is amazing how quickly any 
kind of original expression is recognized, 
and how easily the courageous man sep- 
arates himself from the standards of those 
about him. The weary audience which 
has been lulled to sleep by means of a 
stream of commonplace talk is instantly 
erect and attentive when a man who has 
something to say, and knows how to say 
it, begins to speak. Such a man changes 
86 



Personal Atmosphere 

the atmosphere before his auditors are 
aware. He carries with him an atmos- 
phere which silently diffuses itself Such 
an atmosphere is not to be sought di- 
rectly ; it is to be secured only by cleans- 
ing and deepening the springs of life in 
the soul. 



87 



THE LARGER RELATIONSHIP 

THERE Is a passage in "The Mill 
on the Floss'' which will bear 
meditation. " Maggie's heart," writes 
George Eliot, " went out toward this 
woman whom she had never liked, and 
she kissed her silently. It was the first 
sign within the poor child of that new 
sense which is the gift of sorrow — that 
susceptibility to the bare phases of hu- 
manity which raises them into a bond of 
living fellowship, as to haggard men 
among the icebergs the mere presence 
of an ordinary comrade stirs the deep 
fountain of affection." Behind all per- 
sonal relationships which men establish 
with one another, there is the common 
bond of the universal human relation- 
ship, — this larger fellowship inclosing all 
lesser fellowships, as the nation includes 

all shades of citizenship. All men and 
88 



The Larger Relationship 

women of any sensitiveness put the 
highest value on personal relationships, 
and count their friends among the fore- 
most gifts of life and their friendships 
among their invaluable possessions ; but 
there are a great many who never recog- 
nize in any practical way the larger 
fellowship of humanity ; who treat 
friendship as if it were a luxury to be 
prized and guarded like a precious vase 
or a rare book, and not a large, free, 
noble opportunity for drawing out the 
best from another and giving the best in 
return. 

Our friendships are often selfish with- 
out our being conscious of the fact. 
We look to friendship as a fountain 
from which only sweet waters ought to 
flow, — as a tie which ought to bring us 
only cheer, comfort, and pleasure. But 
friendship has obligations and duties, 
and is to be sought, not only among 
those who are by nature akin to us, and 
who therefore fall in with every mood 
and respond to every emotion, but 
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Works and Days 

among those who in many ways may 
be personally distasteful. Most men 
and women are thrown to a considerable 
degree with those to whom they are not 
personally drawn ; whose personality, 
manners, temper, or quality of mind 
repels rather than attracts ; and when 
intimacy with such persons is forced 
upon us by circumstances, we rebel 
against it as an intrusion upon a domain 
over which we have absolute sovereignty. 
Such persons often stand related to us 
in positions in which it is practically 
impossible not to accept them as friends. 
Our instinct tells us that we have a right 
to avoid intimacies with all who are not 
thoroughly congenial, but the conditions 
of life often contravene the instincts and 
place us in intimacies without our will. 

Under these circumstances it is pos- 
sible to take one of two attitudes : an 
attitude of unwilling acceptance, or an 
attitude of open-minded endeavor to get 
the best out of an association which we 
did not seek ; to attempt to substitute 
90 



The Larger Relationship 

for the personal tie the universal tie, 
and to treat our forced companionship 
as a chance to learn something more of 
our common humanity. If one has the 
clearness of sight and the courtesy of 
soul to accept an enforced relationship 
in this spirit, it is surprising how much 
he can give and how much he can get 
out of that relationship. Out of such 
companionships, unsought and reluc- 
tantly accepted, have sometimes come 
the sweetest of friendships ; and in all 
such companionships there are the rich- 
est possibilities of mutual helpfulness 
and therefore of common growth. We 
cannot afford to be selfish in the selection 
of our friends ; if we are, we diminish 
our own capacity and contract our own re- 
sources for spiritual growth. The strong 
nature can afford to give where it does 
not look for a return ; to develop an 
interest where it does not instinctively 
feel one ; to foster a regard and admira- 
tion when these things do not come 
of themselves. It owes, as a matter of 
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Works and Days 

fact, quite as much to the larger relation- 
ship which is forced upon men by the 
mere fact of race-fellowship as it owes 
to those carefully sought and piously 
guarded relationships between man and 
man which count for so much in the 
joys and sorrows of life. 



92 



IN REMEMBRANCE 

THERE is something very beautiful 
and significant in the revelation of 
character which death makes. On the 
face of one who .has fallen asleep after 
the work of life there often comes a 
deep and tender peace ; as if, at last, the 
real nature had a chance to disclose itself 
in the shining of the face. And those 
who look at the still countenance are 
often penetrated with the feeling that 
something foreign and temporary has 
vanished and, like the taking away of 
a veil, made room for that which was real 
and permanent. The best men and 
women are so involved in a multitude 
of small duties that they sometimes lose 
sight of the goal to which they are 
loyally moving ; they are often mis- 
represented by personal peculiarities and 
passing moods, and we fail to discern 
each instant the large nobility of their 
93 



Works and Days 

aims. Working in crowded ranks, in the 
dust, heat, and uproar of the workshop 
of life, we fail to recognize the great- 
ness or beauty of those who stand beside 
us. But when death comes and brings 
its wonderful silence, all the mists and 
clouds vanish, and we see with clear 
vision. Then, in an instant, the long 
patience, the high idealism, the hatred 
of meanness, the passionate pursuit of 
the best, the affection which was tenderly 
urgent rather than weakly indulgent, 
shine before us, and we wonder that our 
eyes were so long holden. And as the 
years go by and the perspective of time 
lengthens, the true proportions of char- 
acter, the large lines of life, become more 
distinct. Blessed are the dead when they 
live with increasing nobility and beauty 
in the memory of those who knew and 
loved them ! 

Recognition is a matter of secondary 

importance to the brave, the true, and 

the good ; but it is a matter of prime 

importance to others. Not to discern 

94 



In Remembrance 

nobility in every form, or to suffer it to 
become obscured by personal peculiarities 
or moods, is to miss one of the richest 
opportunities of growth. It is well to 
remember that only the good believe in 
the good, and to the noble alone is given 
the power to recognize that which is 
noble. 

" It is a true discrimination," said 
Phillips Brooks, " that recognizes the 
presence of God in men, the saints that 
are in the world, not by the miracles 
they work but by the miracles they are, 
by the way in which they bring the 
grace of God to bear on the simple 
duties of the household and the street. 
The sainthoods of the fireside and of 
the market-place — they wear no glory 
round their heads ; they do their duties 
in the strength of God ; they have their 
martyrdoms and win their palms, and 
though they get into no calendars, they 
leave a benediction and a force behind 
them on the earth when they go up to 
heaven." 

95 



THE CONTAGION OF FAITH 

IT is a significant fact that every intelli- 
gent man finds it necessary to have 
what is called a working theory of life; in 
other words, every man feels compelled, 
in order to live at all and do any 
work, to accept some conception of life 
which makes room for action and place 
for hope. The consistent pessimists who 
believe nothing and hope for nothing are 
few. In pessimism there are almost 
numberless gradations, from despair up 
to that conventional pose into which so 
many people have fallen of late years, — 
fallen so completely that it has become 
second nature to look at the dark side of 
things and to take gloomy views. This 
attitude does not, however, in the least 
interfere with the pleasure which the 
average pessimist finds in life, nor with 
the satisfaction which he takes in his own 
96 



The Contagion of Faith 

work. He has, as has been said, "the 
best possible time in the worst possible 
world.," The men who profess to find 
neither order nor meaning nor beauty in 
life are very often persons who work as 
if the objects which they are striving to 
obtain were worth securing; who hold 
themselves to a scrupulous performance 
of duty, as if duty were not only obliga- 
tory, but were worth doing ; and who 
are loyal in all their personal relations, 
as if loyalty were not only a matter of 
morality but also a source of pleasure. 

To be consistently pessimistic one 
must believe nothing, hope nothing, and 
do nothing. The moment a man hopes, 
believes, or acts, he ceases to be a consist- 
ent pessimist. An effective argument 
can be made for pessimism as a philo- 
sophical theory ; as a working theory it 
is untenable unless one so modifies it as 
practically to destroy its force. There 
are a few smitten and hunted creatures 
here and there in society who, if they 
took their own experience as a basis for a 
7 97 



Works and Days 

judgment of the value of life, might, 
with some show of decency, proclaim 
themselves pessimists ; but, by an ,enor- 
mous majority, men in all parts of the 
world, and in the worst times, find some- 
thing which is worth living for and some- 
thing which is worth doing. The man 
who follows pessimism to a consistent 
end is to be found only in the list of 
suicides. The instincts of humanity, as 
well as its intelligence, its insight, and 
its inspiration, are against a view of life 
which makes life unbearable. 

But while pessimism as a working 
theory finds very few consistent ad- 
herents, pessimism as an intellectual pose 
finds many who are only too ready to 
take courage out of the hearts of those 
with whom they have influence ; for the 
most unfortunate result of the pessimistic 
pose is the devitalization which it effects. 
It takes the tonic out of the atmosphere 
in which men live ; it saps their hopes in 
the exact degree in which they accept it; 
it not only destroys their illusions but 



The Contagion of Faith 

their aspirations as well. It is a kind of 
blight on the finer growths of the spirit. 
The best things in men are evoked by 
their own faith in themselves, or by the 
faith of others in them. He who believes 
that another is base has taken the first 
step, and perhaps the most effective one, 
toward making that other base; while he 
who treats one who is undeserving as if 
he were deserving has taken the first and 
perhaps the most effective step toward 
rehabilitating a fallen man. 

There are two spirits in every man, 
and these spirits are contending together 
for the mastery. In all our relations we 
make our choice whether we shall evoke 
the best or the worst in those whom we 
meet ; whether we shall liberate the best 
that is in them or invigorate the worst. 
There are men who go through life and 
do no evil so far as action is concerned, 
butjwho blight everything fine and fair 
which comes in their way, by the chil- 
ling breath of skepticism ; there are 
others who have a genius for calling out 
LofC. 99 



Works and Days 

the best. It was impossible not to believe 
in the nobility and dignity of life when 
one listened to Phillips Brooks; his at- 
mosphere made skepticism incredible. 
When Hume declared that he believed 
in immortality whenever he remembered 
his mother, he was bearing testimony to 
the almost divine influence which women 
of the highest type always exert, and 
which they often exert in entire uncon- 
sciousness. What a man believes or 
what he disbelieves is a vital matter, not 
only for himself, but for others. Let 
him believe in the best, and, however 
full of faults and imperfections he may 
be, there will be in his own nature a slow 
but tidal movement toward goodness, 
and he will make the attainment of 
virtue easier for all who know him. Let 
a man disbelieve in the possibility of 
purity, integrity, and unselfishness, and, 
although he may have great ability and 
many attractive qualities, he will smirch 
the society through which he passes, and 
leave a blackened trail behind him. 



The Contagion of Faith 

When a man comes to look back on his 
own Hfe, his most blessed comfort may- 
be the discernment for the first time 
that he has helped instead of hindered; 
and his most terrible punishment may- 
be the discernment for the first time of 
the aid which he has given unconsciously 
and unintentionally to the process of 
moral disintegration and spiritual decline 
in those about him. 



/ 



lOI 



DANGEROUS FOES 

IT was said of Jeremy Taylor that 
" nature had befriended much in his 
constitution, for he was a person of most 
sweet and obliging humour, and of great 
candour and ingenuity. . . . His soul 
was made up of harmony ; and he never 
spoke but he charmed his hearer, not 
only with the clearness of his reason, but 
all his words, and his very tone and ca- 
dences, were musical/' This disclosure 
of a winning temper in a man of great 
genius finds its explanation in part in 
certain comments of the eloquent preacher 
touching what he calls little vexations : — 

o 

** . . . be careful to stifle little things," he writes, 
** that as fast as they spring they be cut down 
and trod upon ; for if they be suffered to grow by 
numbers, they make the spirit perish, and the society 
troublesome, and the affections loose and easy by an 
habitual aversation. Some men are more vexed with 
a fly than with a wound ; and when the gnats dis- 

I02 



Dangerous Foes 

turb our sleep, and the reason is disquieted but not 
perfectly awakened, it is often seen that he is fuller 
of trouble than if, in the daylight of his reason, he 
were to contest with a potent enemy. In the fre- 
quent little accidents of a family a man's reason can- 
not always be awake ; and, when the discourses are 
imperfect, and a trifling trouble makes him yet more 
restless, he is soon betrayed to the violence of pas- 
sion." 

This goes to the very heart of the un- 
doing of fine natures by small discom- 
forts, petty annoyances, little troubles. 
They lose serenity, sweetness, and dignity 
because they fail to recognize the fact 
that a sting may be as dangerous as a 
wound, and that the trifle which costs a 
man his self-respect is as important, so 
far as he is concerned, as the great pro- 
vocation which throws him into passion. 
Character is fundamental in all re- 
lations ; without it there is no real, 
genuine, effective human intercourse or 
co-operation. In all conditions and for 
all purposes it is essential that we should 
be able to trust our fellow and to secure 
and hold his confidence. Next to char- 
103 



Works and Days 

acter the most essential qualities for com- 
fort, peace, and happiness are sweetness 
and serenity of spirit. These qualities 
are atmospheric in their nature ; they dif- 
fuse themselves through space; they make 
the weather in which we live ; they flood 
us with sunlight or blight us with chill 
and gloom. Cheerfulness and sweetness 
are commonly regarded as temperamental. 
In many cases they are the natural expres- 
sions of harmonious and well-balanced 
natures. But they are quite as often the 
" lovely result of forgotten toil " ; quali- 
ties which, by patience, care, and per- 
sistence, have been developed out of the 
most unpromising soil by refusal to 
yield to the tyranny of small vexations 
and the wear of wearisome details which 
of necessity fill a large place in every life. 
These petty annoyances crowd every 
path of work or pleasure, and one must 
elect whether he will brush them aside 
with a strong hand or permit them to 
spring up and choke the finer growths 
in his soul. The irritable man is some- 
104 



Dangerous Foes 

thing more than a trial to the men who 
work with him and something worse 
than a steady discomfort ; he is a de- 
pressor of vitality and therefore a waster 
of power. The warm, genial air does 
not invite delicate things out of the soil 
more potently than does the man of 
serene, sunny nature call forth the best 
energies of his .co-workers. When such 
a man is in command, no time need be 
lost in attempts to make working ad- 
justments with him ; every man can put 
his whole force into his task. The irri- 
table, peevish spirit in the household, 
succumbing to every petty annoyance, 
is absolutely fatal to that sweet and 
deep peace in which alone the affections 
put forth all their tendrils and bear 
their most delicate blossoms. There are 
women about whom the whole world 
blooms ; where they are it is always 
June. 

There is something pitiful in the de- 
feat of a man by insignificant foes. When 
a strong nature falls before a powerful 



Works and Days 

antagonist, there Is the sense of tragedy, 
but there may be no sense of humiliation ; 
but when a sting does the work of a 
wound, there comes a certain feeling of 
contempt. In the battle of life, which is 
a struggle, not only for integrity, but for 
sweetness, serenity, and peace, every man 
owes it to his fellows to make a brave 
fight. There is a kind of treason in sur- 
render to petty foes. There are so many 
great troubles in life, so many appalling 
calamities, so many heavy burdens to 
be borne, and such difficult tasks to be 
performed, that it is cowardly to yield 
peace and sweetness to Insignificant as- 
saults on patience and good temper. 

We are bound, not only to resist the 
things that imperil our integrity and 
peace, but to aid and succor our fellows. 
The man who flies into a passion because 
some small thing goes wrong, who is 
peevish, irritable, and disagreeable when 
additional work comes unexpectedly or 
unforeseen accidents occur, not only 
makes life harder for every one about 
io6 



Dangerous Foes 

him, but makes it harder at the very 
time when it is his plain duty to make 
it easier. The moral of the whole mat- 
ter is that there are no small things ; that 
the annoyance, however apparently in- 
significant, which costs a man his tem- 
per, is really important ; and that we 
owe our fellows the duty of sweetness 
and cheerfulness quite as much as the 
duty of fidelity and honesty. On the 
eve of Agincourt, the quiet hopefulness 
of Henry V. was worth another army to 
the decimated English. In the ebb and 
flow of the daily struggle of men in the 
work of the world, the cheerful and 
sunny are bringers of strength and har- 
bingers of victory. 



107 



INVITING THE BEST THINGS 

THE house which has been deco- 
rated and furnished out of hand by 
an expert holds a relation to its owner 
very different from that which is held by 
a house which represents his individual 
taste and has been gradually conformed 
in color and form to his individuality. 
The house which the expert prepares as 
a matter of skill is often very beautiful, 
but it never has the significance pos- 
sessed by the house which discloses 
everywhere the touch of a single per- 
sonality slowly evolving an outward 
harmony in response to an inward 
craving for order and beauty. It is 
wise to have beautiful things about us, 
even if we do not comprehend or enjoy 
them ; but It is far wiser to surround 
ourselves with harmonious colors and 
forms because we cannot rest content in 
any kind of discord. 

io8 



Inviting the Best Things 

True preparation for orderly, beauti- 
ful, and dignified ways of living must be 
made within a man ; and the visible 
beauty with which he surrounds himself 
ought to be a key to his tastes. There 
is an attractive power in character which 
we rarely understand, but which is the 
key to outward prosperity of all kinds. 
The happenings of life lie in wait along 
the highway until the person to whom 
they belong by natural affiliation appears, 
and then instantly attach themselves to 
him. To the passionate, lawless, and 
violent, things of kindred nature are 
always hastening with swift, unerring 
feet. For him who takes the sword the 
sword is always in readiness. The fates 
are asleep until we awaken them ; they 
never come unsought ; they await our 
invitation, and are powerless until we 
open the doors to them. The witches 
on the blasted heath predicting greatness 
to Macbeth did not destroy a noble 
nature. Banquo heard the same fateful 
words, but the doors of his spirit were 
109 



Works and Days 

locked and bolted by loyalty and in- 
tegrity, and over him the spirits of evil 
had no power. Macbeth had long been 
making ready for them, and their words 
of fate fell into a quick soil. All his life 
the future murderer and tyrant had been 
inviting the day when, in the storm of 
battle, his own life should be extinguished 
as mercilessly as he had put out the light 
of countless other lives. 

To men and women of unbalanced 
ambitions, unrestrained passions, un- 
controlled temper, tragedy is always 
approaching. They are marked for 
disaster, not by a fate outside them- 
selves, but by the very structure of 
their own nature. Violence is sown for 
the violent as light is sown for the 
righteous; in the end every man faces 
himself in the harvest he has to reap, 
and no man reaps what he has not sown. 

The unselfish and loving, who serve 

and wait, are often astonished by the 

affection and devotion they evoke. They 

cannot understand how so much has 

no 



Inviting the Best Things 

come to them when they feel so keenly 
their own poverty of spirit and are filled 
with a deep and genuine self-dissatisfac- 
tion. They are always sowing the 
seeds of kindness, but when their ways 
blossom with all manner of beautiful 
words and deeds, they do not recognize 
the fruit of their own sweetness and 
devotion. They are always inviting 
kindness, affection, and trust, and these 
qualities are always lying in wait along 
their paths in a thousand beautiful 
forms. 

If one longs for a noble and har- 
monious life, with the resources of taste, 
intelligence, and culture, with the warmth 
which comes into the air of the world 
from troops of friends, with such an 
external ordering of life in estate, house, 
furnishings, and social order as shall 
express a high-minded and generous 
spirit, let him prepare his own character 
for these great prosperities. To the 
man of harmonious nature, fine taste, 
and kindly spirit, the things which give 
III 



Works and Days 

external life order, beauty, and dignity 
are always coming. If one sets out to 
acquire these things and add them to 
himself, they generally evade and escape 
him ; they are not waiting for him; and 
when he comes they do not know him. 
But let him be in his own spirit what he 
desires to express in his belongings, and 
all these things shall be added to him ; 
they belong to him, and, as a rule, they 
are waiting for him. 



112 



THE GRACE OF GOODNESS 

THERE is a tact of the spirit which, 
by a deep instinct, divines that 
which will hurt and that which will heal 
in human intercourse. This is the fine 
grace of those saints who stay in the 
world without a touch of worldliness, 
who live with as much purity as the 
strictest ascetic, but who shed the radi- 
ance of their devotion along the highway 
of life instead of prisoning it in a cell ; 
who have many interests but never waste 
or dissipate spiritual energy ; and who 
make men aware of the reality of the 
highest ideals without so much as hint- 
ing that they exist. 

Honesty is one of the foundation 
stones of character, but honor is finer 
than honesty, because it transforms hon- 
esty into a spiritual quality by lifting 
it above all considerations of policy or 
advantage. A man may be honest and 
8 113 



Works and Days 

yet grasping and small ; but the man 
who has a delicate sense of honor adds 
to integrity the grace of unselfishness. 
Goodness is always admirable, but there 
are degrees of goodness, as there are 
degrees of culture. It is a great deal, 
amid the manifold temptations of life, 
to find the immovable foundations and 
build upon them ; but all builders do 
not have the same feeling for harmony 
of mass and line, for sound and beautiful 
construction. Ugly houses are some- 
times reared on foundations massive 
enough to support a palace or a cathedral. 
The flowers and fragrance of goodness 
are often lacking in those who possess its 
roots. They are honest, truthful, faith- 
ful to all trusts and duties; but they do 
not diffuse the sweetness of faith in the 
very best things ; they are not enveloped 
in the atmosphere which evokes from 
others all the finer qualities and rein- 
forces all their higher convictions. 

The good are not always winning ; 
they do not always commend the influ- 
114 



The Grace of Goodness 

ences that shape them by their manifesta- 
tion of those influences. They command 
confidence, but they do not make con- 
verts. Such men and women do much 
of the necessary work of the world ; they 
carry its burdens with silent heroism ; 
they are often of the stuff of which saints 
are made, but they have not attained 
sainthood. They lack the higher har- 
mony which comes to those who so com- 
pletely forget themselves that the whole 
nature silently conforms itself to the will 
of God. 

The gentleness and tenderness of 
Christ were expressed in a consideration 
for others, based on a perception of their 
needs, sorrows, and imperfections, which 
makes him the first gentleman in the 
world as well as its most radical reformer. 
Appointed to do the most destructive 
work as a means of reorganizing society 
on a truer foundation, he carried on his 
warfare with weapons which healed as 
they smote ; hating the sin of the world 
with all the intensity of a sinless nature, 
115 



Works and Days 

he, above all men whose words and deeds 
have been recorded, loved more than he 
condemned and saved in the exact meas- 
ure in which he destroyed. 

This spiritual sensitiveness to the 
needs of others breeds the divine tact 
which makes the touch of the uncanon- 
ized saints so gentle and healing. They 
move among the sick, the weary, the 
sinful, with a quiet helpfulness which is 
a kind of health in itself. Instead of 
breaking and bruising, they bind up and 
heal. A deep compassion flows from 
them and envelops in an atmosphere of 
sympathy those whom they would help. 
They refresh us before we understand 
how weary we are; they make us aware 
of our shortcomings in our innermost 
hearts and ashamed in our very souls 
without so much as intimating that they 
see any fault in us. 

Many men and women, with the best 

intentions in the world, go blundering 

through life, hurting where they would 

heal and giving pain where they would 

ii6 



The Grace of Goodness 

bring peace, simply from dulness of spir- 
itual perception. The pathetic prayer 
which Mr. Sill puts into the mouth of 
the Fool, and which sinks into the heart 
of the King, ought to be oftener on our 
lips : 

'* The ill-timed truth we might have kept — 

Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung ? 
The word we had not sense to say — 
Who knows how grandly it had rung ? 

" Our faults no tenderness should ask. 

The chastening stripes must cleanse them all ; 
But for our blunders — oh, in shame 
Before the eyes of heaven we fall ! " 

The blunders of the good are some- 
times more difficult to repair than evil 
deeds ; and they are few against whom 
these lost or ill-used opportunities can- 
not be charged. 

Most of us are in the rudimentary 

stages of spiritual growth ; we lack the 

sensitiveness of spirit which makes the 

saints ministering angels ; we are shut 

117 



Works and Days 

out, by our lack of insight, from that 
finer service which is possible only to 
those who look into the hearts of their 
fellows, and through this knowledge turn 
their love into a healing wisdom. 



ii8 



PERSONAL DEFLECTION 

A LITTLE collection of aphorisms, 
recently printed but not published, 
contains, among other pieces of practical 
wisdom and spiritual insight, this bit of 
advice : " Protect your compass from 
personal deflection." The protection of 
the compass so as to preserve the navi- 
gator from the consequences of deflection 
is a matter of prime importance. So 
much study has been devoted to this 
end that the caring for the compass has 
become a matter of science. A great 
many people do not understand that the 
compass which every man carries in his 
own mind is in danger of constant shift- 
ings from the pole by reason of his own 
temperament, habits, and personal expe- 
rience. The judgment of a great many 
people is constantly vitiated by the fact 
that it is based largely, not on a broad 
observation of facts, but on personal 
119 



Works and Days 

feelings, and on the reactionary effects 
of personal experience. Half the pes- 
simism to which men give expression in 
terms of general condemnation of things 
as they are arises from personal failure 
or disappointment. The man who has 
failed in his own enterprises is always in 
danger of finding the reason for his 
failure, not in himself, but in condi- 
tions, and in arriving at wholly false con- 
clusions in regard to those conditions. 
Nothing is so difficult as to keep one's 
self in perfectly sane and real relations to 
one's work, one's fellows, and to the spir- 
itual environment of life. There are 
very few whose days are not often cloud- 
ed ; who are not hampered in working- 
out their ideas by defects in their own 
temper and by the limitations of their 
own minds ; but no man can see clearly 
and judge wisely who does not know 
these things and take them into account. 
When a wise man finds himself in a mood 
of depression, he may not be able at the 
instant to throw it off, but he refuses to 



Personal Deflection 

come to decisions while he is under its 
spell, because he knows that his judgment 
is, for the time being, vitiated. There 
are a great many days when a wise man 
refuses to act, because he knows that his 
compass is deflected. 

Perhaps the first element of success, 
in the largest sense of the word, is to be 
able to put ourselves out of account in 
reaching general conclusions and taking 
final positions. Because a man is sick, it 
does not follow that all society is out of 
joint; because a man fails, it does not 
mean that the industrial system is wrongly 
organized ; because a man does not attain 
his personal ambition, it does not mean 
that he is in a heartless world surrounded 
by those who will not recognize ability 
and character. When a man begins to 
feel a sense of personal injury, it is time 
for him to take account of his own state 
of mind, and to ask whether he is not 
out of true relations to his fellows by 
reason of his own attitude. Against the 
impression which the moment gives, as 



Works and Days 

Emerson suggested, must be put the 
impression which comes from the year 
and the century ; the detail must be 
viewed in the light of the completed 
whole. Individual disaster must be 
constantly looked at in relation to the gen- 
eral order of things; and one of the finest 
achievements of an honest man is to be 
able to disentangle himself from the 
bitterness of defeat or the anguish of 
sorrow, and look at the world in an im- 
personal and objective spirit. A good 
many pious and wise men of the mystical 
temper have sought clearness of vision 
by withdrawing themselves from human 
relationships and the entanglements of 
practical affairs ; but the finest vision is 
that which a man secures when, in the 
midst of relationships and affairs, he is 
able to look at the great whole of life as 
if he were standing apart from it, and 
there were no bitter pressure from its 
impact on his own fortunes or his indi- 
vidual happiness. 



THE DISCIPLINE OF SUCCESS 

IT is a traditional feeling that the dis- 
cipline of life comes only from things 
which are hard and disagreeable ; the 
things which give pleasure are commonly 
regarded by those who are unthoughtful 
as devoid of self-denial and self-surrender. 
In like manner, and with kindred short- 
ness of sight, we interpret as providential 
those happenings which manifestly for- 
ward our interests and plans, oblivious 
of the oft-taught lesson of history that 
apparent prosperities are often adversities 
of the most searching kind, and that what 
seems at the moment to be the worst pos- 
sible fortune turns to gold in the unfold- 
ing of its hidden potency. And in like 
manner also, we are moved to expression 
of gratitude to God when fields have 
been white and granaries are full, while 
our thanksgiving shrinks into the narrow- 
123 



Works and Days 

est and shallowest rivulet of praise when 
material conditions are adverse, even 
though they are actively making for the 
richest growth of the spirit. To those 
who put themselves in the way of divine 
guidance adversity is as truly blessed as 
prosperity, and narrowness of means for- 
wards the highest interests as definitely 
as opulence. 

The discipline of adversity has been so 
constantly studied and commented upon 
by the moralists of every age that all the 
world recognizes it as a reality, whether 
it profits by its knowledge or not ; but the 
disciplinary side of success often escapes 
observation. In the golden light which 
surrounds an obviously prosperous career 
harsh outlines are so softened that they 
often fade out altogether. But the suc- 
cessful man, if he has any clear self-knowl- 
edge, knows that he is being relentlessly 
tested, and that the sternest adversity 
could not more searchingly reveal the 
quality of his character. The struggles 
of success are forgotten in the opportuni- 
124 



The Discipline of Success 

ties, the comfort, and the applause which 
come with it; but no successful man 
escapes its temptations. Every man of 
insight knows that good fortune, if it is 
his, is to be found, not in his prosperity, 
but in the spirit in which he meets and 
bears it. To keep the moral fibre firm, 
the head clear, the heart warm, the tastes 
simple, when the spirit is assailed on all 
sides by temptations to ease, to com- 
placency, to selfishness, to luxury, in- 
volves a moral struggle which is not less 
severe because it is fought out under 
comfortable conditions. The tests of 
success are more searching than those 
of adversity because the temptations of 
prosperity are more subtle and insidious 
than those of adversity. The unsuccess- 
ful man sees the foes he is fighting ; they 
are in the open field, and he can hardly 
fail to take their measure. The success- 
ful man is assailed by foes which take 
advantage of his ease to attack when his 
guard is lowered. 

It was said of a man of great wealth, 
125 



Works and Days 

who was stricken down in his early prime, 
that he had died in a heroic effort to 
administer a hundred million dollars con- 
scientiously. People at large, when they 
thought of him, thought chiefly of the 
almost unlimited opportunities of enjoy- 
ment which immense wealth offered him ; 
he thought chiefly of the great responsi- 
bilities which it imposed upon him. To 
the world his colossal prosperity was the 
symbol of pleasure ; to him it was a stern 
discipline, under the pressure of which 
his character took on the firmness and 
vigor of a moral athlete, but his body 
sank under the burden. To the thought- 
less, wealth stands for ease and pleasure ; 
but the vast majority of those who possess 
it find it full of work and care. And this 
is true of every kind of success ; the 
world sees its splendor, its apparent ease, 
or its opportunities of enjoying the pleas- 
ures of influence, affluence, and reputa- 
tion ; the man who possesses it feels 
chiefly its responsibilities and thinks 
chiefly of the work it imposes upon him. 
126 



The Discipline of Success 

For the successful men are the heroic 
toilers of our time ; for them all fixed 
working hours are abolished ; life is one 
great hour of toil. To a man like Mr. 
Gladstone work is not a matter of times 
and seasons ; it is the absorbing necessity 
of a lifetime. He may not be indifferent 
to the satisfaction which fame carries in 
its hands ; but he is occupied habitually 
with the colossal work which his position 
brings with it. And this is true of all 
men who are really successful ; for suc- 
cess lies within a man, no matter how 
prosperous his conditions may be ; and 
he only can be held successful who re- 
ceives with an open mind and a willing 
spirit the discipline which prosperity 
brings as relentlessly as adversity. 



127 



THE BEST PREPARATION 

THE best preparation for the future 
does not consist in thinking about 
it, nor primarily in planning for it, but 
in doing the work of the day with the 
largest intelligence and the keenest con- 
science. The schoolboy is not prepared 
for the tasks and responsibilities of man- 
hood by continually dwelling on the 
things he will do when he becomes a 
man ; it is well that he should think very 
little about them, and that the emphasis 
of his thought should rest on the work, 
the play, and the pleasure of the moment. 
He will have his dreams, as every boy 
of intelligence has them, and the future 
will beckon him on with a thousand in- 
visible signs and a thousand inaudible 
voices, to which his heart and imagina- 
tion will continually respond : but it is 
not the future on which his mind ought 
128 



The Best Preparation 

to dwell ; it is the present. He who 
thinks wisely of the present and does 
well with the present thinks most wisely 
and does best with the future ; for the 
future is but the unfolding of the pres- 
ent. The wise farmer spends very little 
time in meditating on his harvest at the 
time of seed-sowing ; his whole concern 
is to get the seed under the ground under 
the best possible conditions, and to give 
it the best possible care. So far as he 
can control it, the future is involved in 
every day's work. 

This is true in every relation of life. 
Work and action ought to be planned 
so far as either lies within the control 
of the planner ; every life ought to be 
dominated by a general aim ; every one 
ought to be working for some ultimate 
purpose ; but the ultimate purpose is 
accomplished and the remotest goal 
reached, not by continually meditating 
upon them, but by getting the vantage- 
ground which comes when each day re- 
ceives the deposit of all that a man can 

9 129 



Works and Days 

give out of his conscience, his intelligence, 
and his character, and every year sums 
up the entire capacity of his nature in 
what has been done. They are right 
who insist that we ought to cultivate the 
expectation of good fortune and to put 
out of our minds the apprehension of 
calamity ; for we best prepare ourselves 
for misfortune by the serenity and poise 
of mind which anticipates and demands 
the best from life. Strength comes, not 
from building shelters for one's self 
against possible disasters, but from living 
bravely and freely as if there were no 
enemy in sight. The man who is always 
skulking across the field seeking some 
form of shelter is quite as likely to fall 
as the man who bravely faces the fire 
from the most commanding position. 
One man shapes his life by fear, and the 
other by courage ; neither is secure, be- 
cause in one sense there is no security in 
life, danger being always present; but 
courage is far more safe than cowardice. 
The best preparation for the future, 
130 



The Best Preparation 

whether for work, calamity, trial, or task, 
is to do thoroughly, bravely, and cheer- 
fully those things which fall to our hand 
day by day. It is after this fashion that 
the greatest works are accomplished ; it 
is by this method that the finest charac- 
ters are formed ; it is in this way that the 
wisest train themselves for life. He who 
gives himself up to thoughts of heaven 
and anticipations of happiness denies 
himself that preparation for heaven which 
comes by accepting the education of life, 
and which is the only sure promise of 
the possession of heaven. We must 
create heaven within ourselves before we 
claim it as a condition. 



131 



FAITH-INSPIRERS 

IT is the advance, whether by the 
movement of a whole army or the 
swift charge of a brigade, which carries 
the field and plucks the flower of victory. 
Prudence preserves that which is already 
secured ; faith, courage, and enthusiasm 
make new conquests. There is immense 
force in mere momentum. An army 
like Alexander's derives its strength, not 
from fortified places left in the rear, nor 
from intrenched camps, but from the 
very swiftness of its movement. Like 
an avalanche it multiplies itself as it de- 
scends. It is a notable fact that all great 
leaders have been great faith-inspirers. 
They have made men believe in their 
genius and their fortune, and have di- 
vided with a multitude the precious gift 
of enthusiasm which, like a star, has led 
them on. Alexander inspired implicit 
faith, not only in himself, but in the men 



Faith-Inspirers 

who were under him. They came to re- 
gard themselves as invincible, and this 
belief was one secret of their sustained 
success. When men profoundly believe 
that they are to succeed, success is already 
won. It is the positive men who ac- 
complish great things ; the negative men 
conserve, but they do not enlarge the 
borders of knowledge or of achievement. 
In science, literature, and business they 
keep that which has been already won, 
but no new beauty, no new ideal, no new 
prosperity ever comes from their hands. 
The great hopes of the world spring 
from the hearts of those who believe, 
and who set themselves to act with the 
positive forces of society. The great- 
est service which any man can render 
to his fellows is to inspire them with faith 
in themselves, to make them believe that 
they are capable of the highest things, to 
fill them continually with that deep con- 
fidence which springs, not from over- 
estimate of self, but from a resolute hold 
upon fundamental principles, an uncon- 
^33 



Works and Days 

querable faith in noble and worthy causes. 
There are few things impossible to those 
who believe ; but most n\Qn are so sur- 
rounded by limitations, so beset by 
doubts, that they distrust their own 
powers and disbelieve the dreams of their 
hearts. Every man who has not utterly 
wrecked himself knows that he was born 
for the best things. This is the hope 
which life continually sets before him ; 
this is the presence of God forever re- 
vealing itself in him. To hear this inner 
voice and follow it ; to make aspiration 
not a dream which lies like a sunset light 
on the horizon, but a quenchless star 
which burns forever before one's con- 
fident feet, is to put one's self in the line 
of the noblest success. There are men 
and women whose whole atmosphere is 
critical, skeptical, and depressing ; there 
are others out of whom confidence is 
breathed, and from whom strength goes 
forth unconsciously to themselves. They 
always appeal to that which is noblest in 
their fellows ; they always inspire their 
134 



Faith-Inspirers 

fellows with new hope and fresh courage. 
There is no joy in life greater than to be 
one of these faith-inspirers, to have this 
sublime health of spirit which makes the 
very hem of one's garment healing, and 
diffuses courage, hope, and faith like an 
atmosphere. 



135 



THE TEST OF OPPORTUNITY 

THE incident of the boatload of 
shipwrecked men, dying of thirst, 
who accidentally dropped a bucket into 
what they supposed to be the sea, and 
found they were sailing in the fresh water 
of the mouth of the Amazon, has been 
used until it is threadbare ; but it is, 
nevertheless, a capital illustration of what 
is happening this very hour to a multi- 
tude of men and women. There are a 
host of people who suppose themselves 
to be eager to find their work in life and 
longing for an opportunity, who are sur- 
rounded by work and opportunity which 
they fail to recognize. The real differ- 
ence between men is not in their chances, 
but in their ability to recognize their 
chances. Opportunities are universal. 
They come in one form or another to 
every human being. It is safe to say 
136 



The Test of Opportunity 

that no man lives whose hand at some 
time has not been at the door of a gen- 
uine opportunity, if he had only raised 
his eyes and discovered that his hand was 
no longer resting on an unbroken wall. 
The trouble is that we do not see. We 
are so intent upon having things come to 
us after some manner which we have de- 
termined upon in our own minds, that 
when they come to us in some other guise 
we let them pass unnoticed. The com- 
mon opportunity comes, as the divinest 
opportunity in the whole history of the 
world came, cradled in obscurity. 

Opportunities wear the humblest 
dress ; they hide themselves behind the 
simplest disguises ; there is nothing in 
them that arouses our interest or awakens 
our suspicion ; for the most part we pass 
them by as the most commonplace things 
in our environment. This is the subtle 
and dangerous test which they apply to 
us. If they came with their value dis- 
closed by the splendor of their attire, 
there would be no test of character in the 
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Works and Days 

manner in which we met them. Every 
man treats a king handsomely ; it is only 
the gentleman who is courteous to the 
beggar. Opportunities come in such 
fashion that our reception of them deter- 
mines our fitness to use them. The man 
or woman of true wisdom knows that 
there is nothing in this world which has 
not noble possibilities in it, and that ap- 
pearances count for nothing when quality 
is concerned. It is not by accident, there- 
fore, that some men succeed and others 
fail ; that some men seem to be passing 
steadily upward and others remain hope- 
lessly stationary. The men who succeed 
are open-minded ; they are alert to dis- 
cover the true value of things ; they do 
not estimate the importance of events 
by their appearances ; they take every- 
thing at its best and use it for its highest. 
So there lies at the bottom of every right 
use of opportunities a noble quality of 
character — that quality which takes life 
as a divine thing, full of noble chances 
of growth and progress. No one will 
138 



The Test of Opportunity 

read these words, however obscure or 
remote from the great centres of human 
activity, about whom there are not doors 
ready to be opened into a wider useful- 
ness and a nobler Hfe. What we need 
is, not a new chance, but clearness of 
vision to discern the chance which at this 
very hour is ours, if we recognize it. 



139 



THE STERILITY OF REST- 
LESSNESS 

THE wide-felt need of calmness of 
nerves and mind is expressed 
in many ways in these days. Some 
of these ways are sane and wise ; some 
of them are unwholesome and mis- 
leading ; but whether wise or foolish, 
they are alike significant of the con- 
sciousness of the lack of something 
which is necessary for the truest growth 
and fruitfulness. The world is full of 
restless men and women, who are vainly 
seeking in some place or philosophy or 
person that repose which can come only 
from inward peace. The ends of the 
earth are searched for that which lies 
close at hand, and distant and alien 
religions are invoked to bestow that 
which the seeker can find only in his 
own spirit. This restlessness is often 
140 



The Sterility of Restlessness 

confused by its victims with intellectual 
and spiritual energy, and the mere agita- 
tion of a wasted nervous force is mis- 
taken for a genuine activity of the soul. 
An immense amount of vitality is ex- 
pended in simply changing localities 
without changing the spirit. The mul- 
titude of invalids and semi-invaUds who 
are seeking health in remote climates is 
matched by another multitude who are 
seeking peace and repose by getting 
into the atmosphere of other faiths and 
traditions. 

As there are world-travellers hurrying 
across every sea and rushing from point 
to point on every continent, so there are 
soul-travellers who are never at rest, but 
are constantly hurrying from philosophy 
to religion and from religion back to 
philosophy. And so there has grown 
up a kind of polyglot knowledge which 
is not and cannot become culture ; and 
a polyglot religion in which there is 
neither the power of personal experience 
nor the peace which flows from individ- 
141 



Works and Days 

ual conviction. It is not by searching 
the earth with tireless feet that men 
come to know their own natures, nor 
by worshipping at many shrines that they 
enter into that peace which passes 
knowledge. Restlessness is always the 
sign of a life unfulfilled and a soul un- 
satisfied ; it is a conclusive evidence that 
one has not come into that harmonious 
relation with himself and the world 
which is the first step towards real 
growth. Agitation often accompanies 
a deep experience, but when the lesson 
of the experience has been learned the 
agitation gives place to peace. The 
first contact with a new field of work or 
of knowledge often moves the spirit 
profoundly ; but when one has taken 
possession of the field, or put his hand 
resolutely to the work, calmness comes. 
For it is only in peace and repose that 
truth reveals its deeper aspects, the spirit 
comes to self-knowledge, and real growth 
begins. We do not begin to grow in 
power and wisdom until we strike deep 
142 



The Sterility of Restlessness 

roots into the soil ; and he who is always 
travelling gets no rootage. In the old 
German student life the year of wander- 
ing had its recognized place as an invalu- 
able part of education ; but it was an 
experience of preparation, not a continu- 
ing habit. It was the path by which the 
learner came at last to his home ; for it 
is only in a true home that the soul 
lives its normal life. 



143 



SOMETHING TO BE 
CULTIVATED 

THERE are few qualities which lie 
so directly within the reach of 
every man and woman, because so im- 
mediately the result of education, as 
self-control ; and yet there are few quali- 
ties which are so generally lacking. 
Everybody has a certain amount of self- 
control, but there are many people who 
compensate themselves for the repression 
of their energies on one side by giving 
them full play on another. Self-control 
means the entire mastery of one's nature ; 
means always having in hand all one's 
powers ; means sitting on the box and 
driving, instead of being driven. The 
absence of self-control is seen in many 
small ways : in the unconscious raising 
of the tones of voice in earnest talking, 
in purely nervous gesticulation and rest- 
144 



Something to be Cultivated 

lessness ; in the inability to drop a sub- 
ject when we have gotten through with 
it; in irritability, and that subdued 
violence, shown, not in outbursts of 
temper, but in little gusts of passion, 
escaping here and there. These are all 
small things in themselves, but many 
of them are exceedingly irritating and 
disagreeable, and they all involve a loss 
of nervous force. The heightened tone 
of the voice, the incessant gesticulation, 
the physical restlessness, are not only 
unpleasant, but they involve needless 
expenditure of a force of which few of 
us possess a superabundance. Complete 
self-control is one of the fundamental 
qualities in any large and high success ; 
for complete self-control means that one 
has one's self completely in hand, and 
is able to address one's self entirely to 
whatever is necessary to be done at the 
moment. It is a great mistake to infer 
power from any kind of violence or rest- 
lessness ; true power is allied with com- 
posure, with calmness, with self-restraint ; 

10 145 



Works and Days 

and real power is manifested in restraint 
and composure, and not in violence of 
speech or action. A man of nervous 
organization recently said that he had 
gained immense benefit by simply watch- 
ing the modulations of his voice, and 
persistently resisting the inclination to 
run into high tones. He had found not 
only relief for the vocal chords, but a 
steadiness and calmness of thought and 
feeling which made him conscious of the 
great blunder of wasting nervous strength 
by suffering the vocal chords to sympa- 
thize with an excited condition rather 
than keeping them under steady control. 
This is one illustration of the possibility 
of overcoming the common forms of 
nervousness. To " let one's self go " is 
not only to lose force at a particular 
point, but to invite a reaction along the 
whole line of physical expression, and 
so to continually stir up and agitate, 
instead of continually restraining and 
calming. Many people lay these minor 
faults on the shoulders of a nervous 
146 



Something to be Cultivated 

temperament, and do not know that a 
nervous temperament, under control, is 
a tremendous force, and as susceptible 
of being governed by the will as the 
grosser appetites or passions. 



147 



THE TRIUMPHANT LIFE 

THERE is nothing more inspiring 
than the story of a triumphant 
Hfe which overcomes great difficulties, 
works itself clear of sharp limitations, 
and issues at last in a large, free activity. 
It is an old story, but it remains the one 
story of which men never tire, and which 
seems to assuage a thirst of the soul. 
For the end of life is freedom and power, 
and those who miss these supreme results 
of patience and toil and character feel 
that they have been defrauded of that 
which was their due. The old stories of 
magic carry a deep meaning under their 
wild extravagances ; they betray the 
mighty passion of men for supremacy 
over things material and over inferior 
orders of life. The man with genii at 
his command could build palaces in a 
night, and rejoice in a marvellous mastery 
over the forces against which so many of 
148 



The Triumphant Life 

his fellows seemed to measure their 
strength in vain. These magical suc- 
cesses are foreshadowings of the real 
successes which all men and women 
crave ; which the noblest and most aspir- 
ing must secure, or lose the joy and 
sweetness of living. These real successes 
are not external, though they are generally 
accompanied by visible trophies ; they 
are achievements of character, and are 
largely independent of conditions and of 
human recognition. The man whose 
life, outwardly all defeat, is steadily ex- 
panding in its interests and sympathies, 
steadily growing in power to bear and 
suffer and be strong, has the blessed con- 
sciousness of coming into his kingdom. 
No outward disaster, no external obstacle 
or limitation, can ever defeat a true life ; 
it can escape all these things as the bird 
escapes the perils of the snare and the net 
by flying above them. This highest of 
all successes lies within the grasp of every 
earnest man and woman, and it is rarely 
without attestations of its presence and 
149 



Works and Days 

value, even in the eyes of those who take 
small account of spiritual things. There 
is a force which streams from a noble 
nature which is as irresistible and perva- 
sive as the sunlight. The warmth and 
the vitality of such natures, while they 
invigorate the strongest men and women 
about them, penetrate to the heart of 
clouded and obscure lives, and minister 
to their need. There is no success so 
satisfying as that which is embodied in 
one's character, and so cannot be taken 
from him, and the influence of which, 
embodied in the character of others, is 
also indestructible. 



150 



THE BEST IN THE WORST 

IN one of Browning's most Inspiring 
poems there is a passage in which 
the poet, imagining himself face to face 
with death, declares that 

** Sudden the worst turns the best to the brave." 

This is no fanciful touch of the im- 
agination, but a statement of a fact which 
has occurred again and again in innum- 
erable lives. History is full of stories of 
the sudden turn of fortune when things 
were at their worst, and when there was 
apparently no possibility of anything but 
final disaster. That which has been true 
of life on a large scale has been eminently 
true of individual lives ; in which again 
and again, when fortune has been at the 
lowest ebb, the tide has turned. It is 
always hardest to believe in this possi- 
bility when such a belief would bring 
151 



Works and Days 

consolation and courage. When things 
are going well, and the outlook is bright, 
it is easy to fortify one's self with phi- 
losophy, and to hold up between one's 
self and adversity and calamity those 
shields of faith and truth which others 
have found invulnerable in the hour of 
need ; but it is a different thing, when 
one's whole happiness or material pros- 
perity is at stake, to face the possibilities 
of the future with calmness and courage. 
Nevertheless, these are the times when 
every one should take counsel with his 
hopes and not with his despair. It is 
an old proverb, which in one form or 
another has found its way into almost 
every language, that " Man's extremity 
is God's opportunity." When the Jew 
consoled himself by repeating the maxim 
of his nation, "In the mount God will 
be found," he recalled one of the sorest 
trials to which a human soul was ever 
subjected, and one of the most despairing 
situations in which such a soul was ever 
placed. To those who fight the battle 
152 



The Best in the Worst 

courageously there often comes, at the 
very moment when everything seems 
lost, some reinforcement that turns the 
tide. The man who has worked long 
and intelligently for success often finds 
it at the very time when the hope of it 
was forever leaving him ; or, if he does 
not find it precisely that for which he 
worked, something better comes to him 
in its place. Do your duty, hold to 
your hope, and your darkest hour may 
be that which announces the dawn of a 
new day. 



153 



SPIRITUAL SELF-RELIANCE 

THE men who achieve valuable or 
permanent results in life are always 
men of self-reliance, — men, that is, who, 
instead of accepting the standards and 
methods of those about them, create 
standards and methods of their own. 
These are the men who supply the 
motive power of society, who give its 
currents of influence and action direction 
and force, and who are continually 
modifying the world in which they work. 
This kind of self-reliance involves no 
egotistic elevation of one*s judgment 
above the judgment of his neighbors ; it 
simply involves a clearer insight into the 
laws of life and a more implicit obedience 
of them. A man like Marconi finds cer- 
tain results already achieved through the 
use of electricity, and certain opinions 
already formed as to the limitations within 
154 



Spiritual Self-Reliance 

which this force can be used. Instead of 
accepting these results as final, he applies 
himself to a new study of the force 
itself, and soon discovers, if not new 
principles, at least new possibilities of 
application. He does not reach this 
result without doubt, hesitation, and 
long questioning with himself Upon 
his own judgment alone he is compelled 
to make large investments of time, 
money, ability, and strength. The opin- 
ion of those around him is generally 
adverse to his success ; he is regarded 
as a dreamer, as a man deficient in 
practical sense and in sound judgment. 
If he is a sensitive man — and such a 
man generally is of sensitive temper- 
ament — the opinion which surrounds 
him like an atmosphere imposes a severe 
struggle upon him, and continually holds 
a great, temptation before him. His 
weaker self continually implores him to 
desist and fall into the beaten paths ; his 
strong self, the self upon which he relies, 
urges him forward. In the end he makes 
, ^55 



Works and Days 

a notable addition to the forces which 
work for civilization, and he does this 
through his power of reliance, not upon 
his weaker but upon his stronger self. 
The weaker self prompts him to rely 
upon the judgment of his fellows ; the 
stronger self urges him to rely upon his 
own personal insight into natural laws, 
his own personal comprehension of funda- 
mental principles. True self-reliance is 
dependence upon principles and forces 
rather than upon current opinion and 
established judgments. This is the self- 
reliance which is the possession of all 
original minds. 

There is a spiritual self-reliance which 
is the secret of great spiritual attain- 
ments and achievements. It is the pos- 
session of this self-reliance which lifts 
men in spiritual power above their fel- 
lows, which transforms them from mere 
recipients of influences already in the 
world into sources of new influences. 
The man of commonplace spiritual ex- 
perience and ordinary spiritual strength 
156 



Spiritual Self-Reliance 

accepts the standard of those about him, 
and lives by the laws which govern his 
fellow-men ; the man of spiritual reli- 
ance turns away from these things, and 
trusts his own intuitions of spiritual 
truth, and his own perception of spiritual 
realities. His hands, his feet, his heart, 
his thoughts, are still with his fellow- 
men ; but these are the servants of a 
new truth and a new power which have 
come to him, not from looking at his 
fellows, but at God. If Abraham had 
been like the men about him, he would 
have stayed with his flocks and his 
friends in the fertile lands of his fathers. 
This was, no doubt, what his lower self 
prompted him to do ; this was his temp- 
tation. But he was a man of true spirit- 
ual self-reliance. Instead of accepting 
the standards of his fellows, he trusted 
his own spiritual intuitions, his own per- 
ception of what was right, and his spirit- 
ual self-reliance was the beginning of a 
great history. The same story might 
be told of Moses, of Isaiah, of Paul, and 
157 



Works and Days 

of every other great religious teacher 
and reformer. All these leaders trusted 
to their personal perception of God, of 
duty, of truth, and not to the percep- 
tions of those who surrounded them. 
And this is the secret of all religious 
thinking and living. 



158 



THE HIGHEST VALUE ON 
OURSELVES 

DISCOURAGEMENT and despair 
are the moods in which men make 
irredeemable mistakes. When hope goes 
out, the soul is defenceless against its 
worst enemies. No man commits suicide, 
either morally or physically, until he 
believes that he has tried every door of 
escape, and that they . are all barred 
against him. So long as any light 
comes into the prison-house in which 
a man sometimes finds himself, he will 
grope about for means of escape ; it is 
only when the blackness is absolute that 
he gives up the fight. No man who 
believes in God ever has either the 
occasion or the right to despair ; there 
is for him a calm beyond every storm, 
however fierce, a sunrise after every 
night, however dark. It is, nevertheless, 
159 



Works and Days 

very hard, when some great calamity or 
sorrow is coincident with physical de- 
pression, to keep one*s heart and to 
preserve one's faith. There are times 
when every man must put away the 
ulterior things for which he has been 
fighting, and fight simply for life, — that 
is, for hope. To let in despair is to 
give up life. We owe it to ourselves to 
believe always that the best and highest 
things were intended for us. The man 
who values himself at a low price will 
not only receive a corresponding valu- 
ation from others, but will finally reduce 
his actual worth to the price which he 
has fixed. 

Putting the highest possible price on 
ourselves does not mean that we consider 
ourselves at the moment worth the price, 
but it does mean that we intend to make 
that price represent our actual value to 
the world. The man who believes that 
honor and reputation and eminent use- 
fulness are coming to him by and by will 
not readily give up the future gain for 
i6o 



The Highest Value on Ourselves 

some small bribe which the present 
offers ; will not let sloth and carelessness 
eat the heart out of his working power; 
will not be content with small and 
meagre performance of his duties from 
day to day ; will not limit and hamper 
his power by some false step, entangling 
himself finally in the mist which a 
momentary discouragement has spread 
about him. It is in times of discourage- 
ment and despair, when a man loses 
sight of his ultimate value, that he 
commits some lasting mistake, or blights 
his life with some irredeemable weakness 
or sin. If in that hour the light of the 
future could suddenly be shed about 
him, and he could see himself at the 
height of his possibilities, the temptation 
for the moment so attractive and irresist- 
ible would seem contemptibly cheap and 
tawdry, and would be put aside almost 
without a struggle. That vision, how- 
ever, comes to us only in our best mo- 
ments ; what we have to do in our 
weaker moments is to believe in it and 
II i6i 



Works and Days 

live by it, although it is hidden from us. 
We shall never make any serious mistake 
or fall into any lasting sin if we can keep 
this faith burning forever like a lamp in 
our souls. Put the highest possible 
value on yourself, and scornfully refuse 
all those bribes which the present is 
constantly offering, and the acceptance 
of which means nothing less than the 
sale of your future. 



[62 



PATIENT LOYALTIES 

HE must have a very small acquaint- 
ance with men and women who 
doubts the existence of as general and as 
noble an illustration of heroism to-day 
as the world has ever seen. There are 
few families in any civilized community 
in which there is not some man or woman 
whose whole life is one of heroic although 
obscure sacrifice, — the kind of sacrifice 
which is all the more heroic because it 
has no other satisfaction than the con- 
sciousness of an obligation discharged and 
a duty performed. There are no more 
beautiful exhibitions of the finer qualities 
of human character than are to be found 
in these patient loyalties ; these devotions 
of the household, unsustained by any 
public recognition, uninspired by the 
hope of any conspicuous achievement, 
but none the less faithfully persevered in 
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Works and Days 

to the end. Stanley's journey through 
Equatorial Africa oppresses one's im- 
agination with a sense of its indescribable 
toil and hardship ; but the great explorer 
had the consciousness of doing a piece of 
work which was not only heroic, but 
which had world-wide relations and would 
receive world-wide recognition. There 
are countless Hves which in unbroken 
continuity of toil parallel Stanley's jour- 
ney, and yet are unattended by any of 
the inspiring circumstances which sus- 
tained the explorer. For a host of people 
life means little more than unbroken toil 
and iminterrupted self-sacrifice, and in 
many of these cases the beauty of the 
life lies in the fact that the man or woman 
who is showing this noble strength is un- 
conscious of any special achievement. 'It 
is easy to face great dangers when they 
last but a little while, and when their suc- 
cessful endurance means recognition and 
honor ; but the patient loyalties of pri- 
vate life, the self-effacement of women 
for the sake of those in their own house- 
164 



Patient Loyalties 

hold who often have neither comprehen- 
sion of the sacrifice made for them nor 
gratitude for it, involve another and a 
higher kind of courage. In every situa- 
tion in life there are men and women 
who are quietly putting their own in- 
terests out of sight in order that some 
other, less vigorous or less fortunate, may 
be sustained and cared for. These beau- 
tiful sacrifices, concealed as they are from 
the world, constitute a chapter of hero- 
ism the like of which has never been 
written by the splendid daring of war 
and exploration. 



165 



CHERISH YOUR IDEALS 

IN every community there are to be 
found men and women who are 
steadily moving ahead of the rank and 
file of their neighbors and companions ; 
every year reveals a wider separation and 
stamps them with a more aspiring per- 
sonality. Even the most unobservant 
begins to feel that there is something un- 
usual about these marked men and 
women ; something which defines them 
from the mass of commonplace people 
about them. They are born to rise by 
the possession of some spiritual quality ; 
some aspiration which by its own impulse 
lifts them out of their surroundings and 
sets them in a new world of thought and 
feeling. It is not necessary that one 
should be born amid the surroundings 
of refinement and culture in order to 
attain the very best results which these 
1 66 



cherish your Ideals 

things have to give. It is an advantage 
to be thus born, and to absorb in child- 
hood, by the unconscious process of 
early education, much that must other- 
wise be learned ; but this is an advantage 
which a good many strong natures have 
missed without apparently suffering any 
real loss. The making of an intellectual 
life is always a personal matter. Intelli- 
gence, culture, and the resources that 
come from these attainments lie within 
the reach of almost every one in this 
country who gets a clear vision of what 
he wants and is willing to work for it. 

There is something very noble and 
inspiring in the spectacle, so often pre- 
sented in American communities, of those 
who by some finer quality of character or 
mind are steadily moving away from 
commonplace life and achieving that per- 
sonal distinction which belongs to all who 
live in fellowship with the highest intel- 
lectual ideals and in companionship with 
the finer minds of the world. Such an 
aspiration is often unrecognized by those 
167 



Works and Days 

who stand nearest and ought to help 
most ; it is often misunderstood and re- 
sented as an ambition to be better than 
one's fellows or one's family ; but those 
who have the real quality can well afford 
to disregard this lack of sympathy or the 
criticism which comes from this kind of 
misinterpretation. A genuine aspiration 
is never otherwise than noble and unself- 
ish, even when it draws one away from 
the natural companionships of life, — sep- 
arates one, that is, not in feeling or in 
sympathy or in the common fidelities, 
but in taste and habit and intellectual 
companionship. No young man or 
woman need live a commonplace life. 
There is always an open path to the 
higher ranges of living for those who are 
willing to take it. Cherish your aspira- 
tions and live by them ; they are your 
real guides ; they embody the divine 
ideal of your life ! 



68 



THE DENIALS OF GOD 

THE suggestion made a few years 
ago to test the efficacy of prayer 
by scientific methods excited a great deal 
of journalistic interest and was widely 
commented upon, but disclosed from the 
very beginning lack of insight into the 
true nature of prayer; for the essence 
of prayer is not confidence in the ability 
of the petitioner to bend the Infinite 
Will or to control the power of the 
Infinite arm for his own ends. He 
would be a rash man, essentially unsci- 
entific as well as profoundly irreligious, 
who should venture to set a limit to 
what is called the direct answer to prayer, 
— that is to say, the answer in the form 
in which the prayer is presented; but 
the essence of prayer is always submis- 
sion to the Divine Will; it is a petition 
for what the petitioner believes to be the 
best good of some person or some cause. 
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Works and Days 

If he could understand that what he asks 
for, If granted, would Involve great mis- 
fortune or serious moral disintegration 
to the person or cause, the prayer would 
never be made. Now, any Intelligent con- 
ception of prayer involves this purpose on 
the part of the individual, and conceives 
of the answer to prayer as being dictated 
by the divine Insight into the purpose 
and needs of the petitioner. For this 
reason the silences of God are as signifi- 
cant as those responses which seem so 
direct that we can hardly question their 
authority ; and the denials of God are as 
much answers to prayer as are his silences 
or his responses. Shakespeare saw this 
distinctly, great psychologist as he was^ 
when he said : 

We, ignorant of ourselves. 
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers 
Deny us for our good : so find we profit 
By losing of our prayers. 

Probably no one will read these words 

who cannot look back at some cherished 

hope or some passionately loved purpose 

170 



The Denials of God 

the denial of which brought at the mo- 
ment sorrow and something like despair ; 
that denial, however, seen in the light of 
to-day, stands out as the greatest piece 
of good fortune. Many a man has 
striven for some special position upon 
which he had set his heart, some special 
specific opportunity which seemed to him 
the only open door to fortune, and when 
the position slipped through his fingers, 
or the opportunity went in some other 
direction, it seemed as if life had ended ; 
but, looking back after a decade, it is 
often evident that the loss of the position 
and the missing of the opportunity were 
the very things which opened the way 
for a higher and broader success. Our 
prayers are Umited by our knowledge, 
but they are answered out of the wisdom 
of God. For that reason they are per- 
haps as often denied as granted, and in 
the denial the petitioners are most truly 
heard. 



171 



THE SOUL OF WORK 

THE first and constant demand of 
all his employees and co-workers 
made by a very successful man of busi- 
ness in New York is that their spirit 
shall be right ; so long as their hearts 
are in the work he cares little for details. 
Not every man of action is so keen- 
sighted ; most men of this stamp are ex- 
acting in matters of discipline, and care 
little for the spirit in which the work is 
done. The spirit is, nevertheless, the 
main thing ; if the spirit is right, there 
will be no shirking, no inefficiency, no 
procrastination. Where a man's spirit 
leads him, there will his feet walk will- 
ingly and his hands toil gladly. He 
will need neither urging nor watching ; 
no one will demand so much of him as 
172 



The Soul of Work 

he will demand of himself; no one will 
be half so critical of his manner and 
method as himself. When the motive 
power is right, the machinery will look 
after itself; if the motive power is defec- 
tive or unregulated, the finest machinery 
is useless. Now, one of the secrets of 
success is getting one's spirit into one's 
work ; getting behind all one's activities 
the full force of one's motive power. 
This is by no means so common as one 
would think ; it is, in fact, so uncommon 
that when a man puts his whole force 
into his work he soon attracts attention 
because by that very fact he separates 
himself from the crowd. 

A great deal of the work of the world 
is done in. a perfunctory manner; done 
to get through with it ; done to secure 
the return which it promises. It is done 
without enthusiasm, originality, conta- 
gious zeal. Stores, shops, offices, facto- 
ries, are full of men whose chief desire 
is to get their work off their hands as 
quickly and with as little expenditure of 
173 



Works and Days 

strength as possible. They put as little 
of themselves as possible into it. These 
are not the men who invent new methods, 
perfect new processes, secure rapid and 
honorable advancement ; they are not 
the men upon whom everybody relies, 
whom everybody trusts, who turn the 
reluctant face of Fortune towards them- 
selves. 

The men who give their work char- 
acter, distinction, perfection, are the men 
whose spirit is behind their hands, giving 
them a new dexterity. There is no 
kind of work, from the merest routine to 
the highest creative activity, which does 
not receive all that gives it quality from 
the spirit in which it is done or fashioned. 
Work without spirit is a body without 
soul ; there is no life in it. Flawless 
workmanship is tinsel unless touched by 
some influence of the spirit ; imperfect 
workmanship is often redeemed by the 
power of spirit lodged in it. Every- 
thing that lacks spirit is mechanical, no 
matter how high the grade of its execu- 
174 



The Soul of Work 

tion ; everything that contains spirit 
possesses hfe. To put spirit into one's 
work is to vitaHze it, to give it force, 
character, originality, distinction. It is 
to put the stamp of one's nature on it, 
and the living power of one's soul into 
it. When Mr. Arnold, in one of his 
brief speeches in this country, urged 
young writers to put their hearts into 
their business, he disclosed one of the 
sources of his own influence. His tech- 
nical skill was great, his sense of beauty 
delicate and almost faultless, his instinct 
for form unerring ; but all these qualities, 
though they gave his work a great charm, 
did not give that work its peculiar influ- 
ence upon many of the finest minds of 
the day. That influence came from the 
fact that Mr. Arnold put his spirit into 
every line he wrote, charged his work 
with his own personality. It is the 
quality of spirit which gives his verse its 
beautiful meditativeness, and his prose its 
peculiar sincerity and audacity. That 
which imparts life to the highest artistic 
175 



Works and Days 

work imparts it to every kind of activity 
to which men set their hands. It is 
always the man who puts his spirit into 
his work who makes his work tell for his 
own success and advancement. 



176 



SELF AND OTHERS 

THERE IS a sublime order in hu- 
man life as well as in the universe 
which surrounds and sustains it, — an 
order which comprehends all needs, co- 
ordinates all action, and provides for all 
growth. The chemical relations of mat- 
ter are but imperfect analogues of the deli- 
cacy, the multiplicity, and the inclusive- 
ness of moral relations. All things which 
men touch through any sense, by any 
thought, in any act, distil some moral 
quality and react either for good or ill. 
We are played upon by influences too 
many for our comprehension, too deli- 
cate for our observation, too far-reaching 
for our foresight. When we seem to be 
sacrificing things most precious to us, we 
are often receiving them back in some 
finer and imperishable form ; when we 
seem to be working solely for others, we 
12 177 



Works and Days 

are often serving ourselves in the highest 
and noblest way. 

Doing for others, bearing the burdens 
of others, identifying ourselves with the 
struggles and labors of others, help 
mightily in the working out of our own 
lives. It is wise to drop resolutely our 
difficulties at times, to turn aside abruptly 
from the questions which we are trying 
to answer ; it invigorates the soul and 
gives the mind a new grip on the per- 
plexing problems. Mathematicians car- 
rying on extended calculations sometimes 
find themselves forced to clear their minds 
of figures and betake themselves to some 
other occupation or amusement; when 
the mind has recovered its tone, the 
tangles are swiftly straightened out. 
Every life needs a large and noble di- 
version from its perplexities and cares; 
needs a catholic sympathy with others to 
preserve it from selfishness, a steady 
and hearty co-operation with others to 
give its own work breadth and solidity. 
No sane man lives for himself; sooner 
178 



Self and Others 

or later, a life wholly self-centred loses 
its soundness and becomes distorted and 
diseased. The two elements of self-de- 
velopment and care for the interests of 
others must be kept in equipoise if har- 
mony, sympathy, and largeness of char- 
acter are to be secured and maintained. 
The true remedy for morbid self-con- 
sciousness, the real refuge from personal 
grief and loss, are to be found, not in the 
monastery, as the old ascetics thought, 
but in closer contact with the suffering 
world, in more devoted consecration to 
the welfare of those about us. There is 
no such efficient help for ourselves as 
lending a hand to aid our fellows. When 
Faust had come to the end of his long 
seeking, he found the happiness which 
had always eluded him in giving himself 
to the service of men. It was not in 
self-gratification that the tragic problem 
of his life worked itself out, but by large 
works for the public welfare. Knowl- 
edge, power, and passion failed to satisfy ; 
it was only when unselfish purpose tri- 
179 



Works and Days 

umphed over all lower ambitions that 
peace and victory came. Not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, was 
the aim of the divinest life ever lived 
among men. 



i8o 



WAIT FOR RESULTS 

THE besetting sin of many men is 
impatience ; unwillingness to wait 
until their experience bears fruit, or their 
thought has traversed the whole field of 
fact, before arriving at a final conclusion. 
This has always been a besetting sin of 
the race; men have constituted them- 
selves arbiters, and sat in judgment on 
the universe when their knowledge in- 
cluded only a few facts and covered a 
very small field. They were ready with 
the naked eye to formulate the science 
of astronomy before the telescope had 
opened up the heavens to them ; they 
hastened to create for themselves images 
of God before their minds had yet opened 
to any large revelation of Him; they 
manufactured systems of theology while 
they were still ignorant of some of the 
most important facts concerning them- 
i8i 



Works and Days 

selves and the world in which they lived. 
Theories of literature and art, once held 
and now abandoned, strew the road along 
which men have travelled as the deserted 
shells line the sea-shore. Only the most 
thoughtful and reverent have been con- 
tent to wait patiently on the Lord ; the 
great mass have rushed on and ended in 
some dark ignorance which they have 
established as a system of knowledge. 
It is one of the healthy signs of human 
growth that thoughtful men are becom- 
ing more and more shy of systems and 
theories which claim to be final, and are 
holding more and more to what are 
known as working theories, — explana- 
tions of facts, in other words, which afford 
the basis of further observation and re- 
flection. The mere expansion of thought, 
without conscious destructive purpose, 
has relegated many systems of the past 
to the limbo in which are collected all 
manner of discarded and worn-out things. 
The world and life and literature and art 
have disclosed so many new aspects, have 
182 



Wait for Results 

revealed such unsuspected depths, that 
the most thoughtful men are content to 
wait for fuller knowledge before attempt- 
ing a final explanation. 

The same impatience is manifested by- 
most of us in our personal experience. 
We are unwilling to submit ourselves to 
the discipline of a wisdom larger than 
our own, to the guidance of a power 
superior to ourselves. We demand every 
night an explanation of the events of the 
day. Every painful experience, every 
self-denial, every sorrow, wrings from us 
an impatient cry because we do not un- 
derstand it at the moment. Our con- 
ception of life is so small and mean that 
we feel as if we ought to be able to 
understand every part of it from hour 
to hour. We are not content with the 
revelation which makes clear to us 
how to live justly and rightly ; we de- 
mand that fuller revelation which makes 
all things plain to thought ; we are un- 
willing to sit as pupils at the feet of 
Life ; we continually demand to be ac- 
183 



Works and Days 

cepted as equals of the great teacher to 
whose care God has committed us ; we 
refuse to learn the lesson of experience, 
whose perpetual word is — Be patient. 
Again and again the years have brought 
to us the knowledge which the earliest 
moments of loss and sorrow denied us ; 
but with each new enforced surrender 
of our purposes and our pleasures we 
repeat the old blunder ; and, instead of 
waiting patiently until the fruit of the 
experience has ripened, we interrogate the 
silence which surrounds us, and when it 
refuses to answer, we cry out in bitter- 
ness and despair. A nobler view of 
life would make us content and even 
glad to wait for the larger truths and 
the deeper joys which an unfolding ex- 
perience contains for those who are pa- 
tient and faithful. 



184 



AT OUR DOORS 

MOST men and women have un- 
selfish impulses ; they would 
like to serve some good cause or to help 
some struggling person. In many cases 
these impulses never get beyond the 
stage of impulse ; they appear on the 
horizon of thought and disappear like 
beautiful summer clouds ; they are radi- 
ant, remote, and unfertile. There are 
some, however, to whom these unselfish 
desires come more frequently, and are 
more constantly present, but remain im- 
pulse only because there seems to be no 
way to make them operative ; perpetually 
suggesting the performance of a work 
which the hand seems unable to do because 
the opportunity is apparently lacking. 
Such men and women are often envious 
of those who have been called to harder 
but more unselfish careers. If such work 



Works and Days 

came to their hand, they are sure they 
would do it ; but what possible service 
can they perform in their limited field ? 
There never was a greater mistake than 
that which removes the need and want of 
the world to a distance ; which makes 
people feel that they are shut out from 
noble unselfishness of thought and action 
by reason of the narrow range of activity 
about them. There is no community so 
small that there is not room in it for the 
spirit and work of large-hearted and 
large-minded men and women ; there 
is no village, no remote neighborhood 
which does not cry out for the inspi- 
ration and help of a great service. 
The great problems are never at the 
ends of the earth ; they are always at 
our own doors, and we turn them away 
as if they were beggars, instead of 
God's messengers, sent to us with a 
divine commission for a divine work. 
First and foremost, it may be the privi- 
lege of every man and woman to enrich 
the Community with one of those noble 
i86 



At Our Doors 

and unselfish natures which are a per- 
petual ministration of heaven in the 
world ; those natures which diffuse cheer 
and light and faith in high things as the 
sun diffuses heat and power through the 
whole atmosphere. The value of one 
noble man or woman in a community is 
simply incalculable ; no service of the 
hands, no special work for any cause, is 
comparable with it in influence and inspi- 
ration. The influence of one man who 
looks over the narrow walls of his own 
interests and carries the welfare of his 
neighbors in his heart and mind, is like 
the falling of the rain which revitalizes 
every living thing. This noblest service 
to your kind is open to you. Does your 
life touch the community in which you 
live with the power which stimulates 
every good enterprise ? Does your char- 
acter mean kindlier feeling, purer religion, 
better education for and among your 
neighbors ? 



187 



AFTER THE NIGHT 

THERE are days in every life when 
sorrows and troubles that have 
been fought against and held in control 
by a strong will overflow all barriers and 
threaten to overwhelm the soul. Wave 
after wave of anguish sweeps over one, 
until every landmark is lost and one 
prays for death. Such hours have no 
instant consolation ; faith cannot hold 
them at a distance ; activity, courage, 
consecration, cannot avoid them ; they 
belong to our human life, and they must 
be endured as part of our human expe- 
rience. Even Christ was not free from 
such hours of anguish ; the story of the 
desert, of Gethsemane, of many a lonely 
mountain-watch, if it could be told or 
comprehended, would touch the world 
anew with a sense of gratitude to One 
who bore our sorrows and carried our 



After the Night 

griefs. Clearly as the stars of truth and 
of purpose shone down into the depths of 
that marvellous nature, there were nights 
when their light was dimmed by a mist 
of tears ; there were moments, brief but 
terrible, when the agony was almost too 
great to be borne. 

In the darkness which overshadows us 
at such times, we are often tempted to 
cry out, " My God ! why hast Thou for- 
saken me ? " The desolation has not 
only blotted out the joy of the familiar 
world about us ; it has hidden the very 
heavens, and left us alone and hopeless 
in the universe. But that cry which 
seems to have the accent of death in it 
may be the birth-cry of a nobler life ; the 
God who seemed to have turned away 
from the cross on Calvary was never so 
near to humanity as in that awful moment, 
when the heart-broken sufferer was just 
about to emerge from darkness into the 
unbroken light of immortal triumph. 
His trial. His solitude. His anguish, were 
all behind Him when that startling cry 
189 



Works and Days 

was wrung from Him ; He seemed to be 
entering Cimmerian night, but He was 
really on the threshold of eternal day. 
In our history the same experience is 
often told; in our Gethsemane blackness 
seems to have settled down forever, but 
the splendor of the resurrection morning 
is only three days removed. Human 
anguish is real and terrible, as real and 
terrible for the moment as if it were to 
be eternal ; but, at the longest, how brief 
it is compared with the sweep and du- 
ration of our life ! The very memory 
of those hopeless griefs of childhood 
which once held us in their grasp has 
faded ; we cannot recall them ; or, if we 
recall them, it is without any sense of 
pain. Many a bitter disappointment 
and trial lies behind us, beautiful now as 
we look back on it, with the light of a 
purpose higher, and a wisdom wiser than 
ours. No noble soul ever passes through 
the night of anguish without finding, as 
the shadows fall away, a new and heavenly 
light on the familiar earth. So Savona- 
190 



After the Night 

rola passes into a nobler conception of 
his mission to men ; so Dante enters into 
a world untrodden before by human feet; 
so the nation casts off its burden of 
wrong, and stands erect, conscious of a 
new life in its heart and a new and 
grander work in its hands. The hour 
on the cross will never be otherwise 
than unspeakably bitter, but the morning 
of the resurrection is always just beyond. 



191 



SUCCESS IN FAILURE 

THE man who has learned to make 
his failures the omens of success 
has learned one of the most valuable 
secrets of life. Some men are discour- 
aged by their failures ; they accept the 
momentary defeat as a final decision 
against them, and they retire from the 
struggle disheartened and vanquished. 
Life has gone against them, and they 
will strive no more. There are other 
men, however, to whom failure never 
suggests anything more disastrous than a 
wrong method, an imperfect plan, a faulty 
piece of work. The thought of defeat 
never comes to them ; they will find the 
defect, remedy it, and strive again. Fail- 
ure to such men is the discipline which 
prepares for success, the education which 
trains for victory. Such momentary de- 
feats lie in the way of every noble con- 
quest in science, literature, art, public 
Tg2 



Success in Failure 

life, or practical enterprise. Few great 
questions are settled at the start, fev/ 
great reforms are effected in a day, few 
notable inventions work well on the first 
trial, few strong men disclose their full 
power and take their true place by a 
single brilliant achievement. Slow ex- 
perimentation, frequent failure, delay, 
opposition, obstacles, lie along the road 
to success in every line of work, and 
remind us constantly that God means 
that every man shall get character out 
of his work, even more richly than he 
gets material reward. 

Our thought and our talk about suc- 
cess are rarely spiritual, often purely 
material. The end of business is to 
make men ; but to hear many business 
men talk it would seem as if men were 
made for business only. Anything that 
interferes with the profits of the year is a 
calamity, although it may mean the re- 
turn of moral health to the whole com- 
munity. There are multitudes who would 
like to put principles, progress, sentiment, 
13 193 



Works and Days 

out of the world because these things are 
constantly disturbing the market. They 
would rather the curse of slavery should 
be perpetuated than that the price of 
bonds should be disturbed by agitation ; 
they would rather the Irish question 
should go unsettled than that the country 
should pass through the turmoil of a 
general election. Peace at any price is 
the cry of these men ; " Keep quiet, and 
give us a chance to make money," is 
their reply to every appeal for aid in the 
struggle against wrong. But God takes 
care that the peace which selfishness asks 
for shall never come ; movement, change, 
progress, are inevitable ; and, so long as 
the world stands, these things and the 
results that flow from them will baffle 
and thwart the schemes and wishes of 
those who want the quiet road to a low 
and easy success. There is a divine 
scorn of our ItDw ideals of success con- 
tinually manifested in the almost con- 
temptuous indifference with which our 
carefully elaborated plans are brushed 
194 



Success in Failure 

aside and cast ruthlessly into chaos. 
God does not stop to explain this con- 
stant interference ; the rubbish of our 
mean materialism is not worthy of so 
much notice. The scheme that would 
bring us a fortune without work and 
with considerable loss of honor is whirled 
out of sight in some sudden tempest of 
change, and we are left to take the long, 
arduous road which never brings us to the 
gold we once craved, but which teaches 
us to be honest, clean-hearted, humble, 
patient, and noble. In place of the poor 
material success that would have made 
us vulgar and small, we attain a strong 
and permanent development of character, 
an understanding of life beside which 
Golconda is a heap of rubbish, and a 
nobility of nature beyond price. This 
is the only real success, and in the win- 
ning of it one must look for failures of 
all kinds. 

The chief value of a great and pro- 
longed struggle is oftener in the effort 
than in the achievement. The great 
19s 



Works and Days 

charm of scholarship is in the scholar, 
and not in his acquirement ; the latter 
serves noble purposes, but its finest result 
is the man himself. The noblest out- 
come of a great business career is not the 
fortune which rewards it, but the probity, 
sagacity, far-sightedness, and mastery of 
affairs which it develops in the merchant 
and financier. A great statesman like 
Mr. Gladstone renders services to his 
nation and to civilization of quite in- 
calculable value ; but to Mr. Gladstone 
himself the greatest success he attains 
lies in the achievement of his character. 
The other successes he leaves after a 
little, and as other work presses upon 
other men the splendor of his perform- 
ance fades into past history ; but the 
work he has wrought in himself abides 
as his permanent possession. It can 
never be taken from him ; it is his 
training and equipment for the eternal 
hereafter. 

There are thousands to whom the 
immediate success rarely comes ; they 
196 



Success in Failure 

are met by constant failure and disap- 
pointment, they struggle with scant re- 
ward and scantier recognition from the 
world. The sweets of success are never 
theirs ; the struggle, the labor, and the 
long-deferred hope are their daily ex- 
perience. Such men need not miss the 
crowning of life ; it may be theirs to 
pluck from failure the immortal flower 
of noble character. 



197 



GREATER THAN HEREDITY 

ONE of the immediate results of 
modern scientific thought is the 
deepening sense of the power of heredity 
and circumstances over individual lives. 
There is, of course, an immense element 
of truth in the facts which science has 
laid bare on this side of human activity, 
and in the inferences which have been 
drawn from these facts. No human 
being is independent of his ancestry, his 
race, or his age. They supply him with 
the tools with which he works out his 
destiny. But it is very easy to over- 
state this truth ; and it is constantly 
over-stated in current literature. This 
over-statement, or, perhaps more accu- 
rately, this imperfect statement, of the 
immense force of heredity and surround- 
ings exerts upon many minds a depress- 
ing and paralyzing influence. The man 
who is born with vicious tendencies in 



Greater than Heredity 

his blood, or the man who finds himself 
on the threshold of his career without 
the training which other men have re- 
ceived, often feels that defeat is inevitable, 
and ceases to make any struggle against 
what he calls destiny. When the teach- 
ings of science are interpreted in this way, 
they become not only pernicious, but 
absolutely false. Society is full of the 
refutations of any such conclusion as 
this. Men have risen to the highest 
places from origins and influences which 
seemed specially combined to chain them 
down forever. The artist must work in 
the material which he finds at hand, but 
his conception is his own ; and that, after 
all, is the soul of his work. He cannot 
choose his material, but he can always 
choose the use he will make of it. This 
is the very citadel of manhood ; when it 
is once stormed and surrendered, the 
man may continue to exist, but he ceases 
to live. 

Men to-day need to have their faith 
in their own power to surmount circum- 
199 



Works and Days 

stances and to create their careers strength- 
ened and deepened. In order that they 
may work intelligently, they need to 
understand the conditions under which 
they are compelled to work ; they need 
to know the traits they have inherited, 
and they need to discern the kind of 
opportunities at hand ; but, above all, 
they need a deeper and more vital con- 
sciousness that they themselves are greater 
than either inheritance or environment ; 
and that they were born, not to be made 
by these, but to modify and recast them. 
Every human life at the bottom is a 
revolt against its environment ; every 
great reform is a reaction against influ- 
ences that are at the moment apparently 
irresistible ; every great career is a tre- 
mendous struggle against existing things ; 
and yet great reforms are always on the 
way, and great careers are always being 
worked out. In every generation there 
are born hosts of men and women whose 
great service to society is the modification 
they make in the existing order of things. 
200 



Greater than Heredity 

They arrive at usefulness, eminence, and 
power in the face of circumstances ; and 
they attain these things by virtue of the 
individual force which lies in every 
human soul. No man is relieved from 
responsibility because of that which his 
ancestors have transmitted to him, or be- 
cause his own age is inhospitable. No 
man ought to despair because he is be- 
ginning the battle against odds. Every 
man who makes the honest endeavor to 
live his own life sooner or later strikes 
off the chains that bind him, and in 
making himself free becomes a liberating 
force in the lives of others. 



201 



THE SECRET OF FRESHNESS 

ONE of the most serious losses which 
befall men is the loss of freshness 
of spirit in dealing with the manifold 
relationships and duties of life. With 
the lapse of time there is always danger 
that the first zest and zeal will pass, and 
leave us servants of duty or slaves of 
routine. Joy and enthusiasm fold their 
wings, and we walk wearily where we once 
passed with swift and victorious move- 
ment. Our business becomes drudgery, 
our duties onerous, our relations of af- 
fection lose the charm of sentiment. 
There are always a few rare natures who 
escape the decay which despoils the 
bloom of life, and carry with them into 
noon and evening the freshness and 
splendor of the morning. These are, by 
virtue of this quality, our guides and 
inspirers ; they continually renew for us 
and in us the early vision, the pristine 
202 



The Secret of Freshness 

beauty of living. They show us again 
the loveliness we once saw in the flower, 
the glory we once saw in the sky, the 
dignity and nobility which life wore for 
us before care and selfishness had im- 
paired our finer perceptions. 

The joy which such natures preserve 
for themselves and others, the power of 
impulse toward high and noble living 
which they continually generate, do not 
belong by nature to the few; they are 
universal gifts, within the reach of all 
who will put out a hand to take them. 

" 'Tis heaven alone that is given away, 

'Tis only God may be had for the asking.*' 

The secret of perpetual freshness in a 
human soul, of renewing life each day in 
the beauty of the first creation, lies in 
the clear and permanent perception of the 
great spiritual forces and truths of which 
all visible things are the symbols and 
revelation. The mother ministers to her 
child without pause or rest; the long 
day of her service is divided by no swift- 
203 



Works and Days 

passing hours, and broken by no change 
of morning into night, or night into 
morning. Head, heart, hands, and feet 
are incessantly taxed to care for, develop, 
and direct the young life. There are 
times when all these grow weary and 
would fail if it were not for the conscious- 
ness, kept clear and luminous by love, 
of the inestimable worth of the growing 
soul that receives all this as its right and 
does not even think its gratitude. Every 
true mother understands the spiritual 
relationship in which she stands to the 
little group at her feet, and this per- 
ception sheds a continual radiance about 
them and her. 

Not less deeply and fruitfully are we 
all related to our duties, — those incessant 
demands upon our life which at times 
almost drain it to the last drop. Met 
simply from a sense of obhgation, with- 
out the abiding consciousness of their 
spiritual significance, they deplete and ex- 
haust us ; but met with the clear insight 
which discerns the growing purpose of 
204 



The Secret of Freshness 

God behind them, they become trans- 
formed and radiant with prophecy and 
promise ; the drudgery of the day is no 
longer drudgery when one sees in it the 
slow unfolding of a great new thought 
for one's life. 

In all our relations with the men and 
women about us there are the same ten- 
dency to weariness and the same remedy 
for it. In the privacy of the home there 
are, year in and out, the same faces, 
names, voices, duties, occupation ; there is 
a routine which conceals and at times al- 
most buries the deep and beautiful ties 
that have made the family imperishable 
and invulnerable amid the vicissitudes 
of civilization. They only know the 
joys which make these relations wells of 
inspiration and happiness along the jour- 
ney of life who hold in clear view the 
rich spiritual relationships of which the 
family ties are a perpetual and beauti- 
ful revelation, a parable repeated from 
generation to generation with ever-deep- 
ening meaning. 

205 



Works and Days 

Spiritual strength is the only real 
strength, because it alone is capable of 
infinite renewal ; and in the possession 
of this strength lies the secret of that 
freshness of sentiment and zeal which, 
like dew from heaven, revives the rarest 
flowers along the path of life and renews 
day by day the beauty and fragrance of 
their earliest blooming. 



206 



PATIENCE WITH OURSELVES 

IT is sound instinct which keeps alive 
so well worn a story as that of Bruce 
and the spider, — the unconquerable in- 
stinct deep in every man and woman to 
triumph over obstacles, and to express 
personaHty in positive achievement. The 
story of success in the face of constant 
and long-repeated failure is a familiar one, 
— a story told in lives as illustrious as 
those of Lord Nelson and Richard Wag- 
ner, and in a thousand lives of which 
no public record is made. Patience in 
dealing with untoward circumstances and 
overcoming objective difficulties is a qual- 
ity which not only has the honor of all 
men, but which brings a certain reward 
as the struggle goes on. There is an- 
other kind of patience, however, much 
more difficult to acquire, and not so 
clearly seen and honored, — the patience 
207 



Works and Days 

demanded of a man by himself. Many 
a man who has great power of persistence 
in matching himself against outward 
obstacles feels constantly depressed and 
discouraged when he faces his own nature 
and recognizes the return of faults and 
tendencies and weaknesses which he 
hoped he had overcome and cast out. 
No problem is so exacting or demands 
for its solution such infinite patience and 
persistence as that which is presented to 
a man by himself. 

If the secrets of all hearts were re- 
vealed, it would be found that hosts of 
men give up the struggle with themselves 
because they have not sufficient patience 
with themselves. They become disheart- 
ened by their failure to subdue obvious 
faults and to cast out evil tendencies. 
It is the broken resolution, the deserted 
position, the infidelity to a clearly defined 
purpose, the unexpected return of the 
old temptation in its old force that take 
the life and courage out of a great many 
men. It seems as if no progress were 
208 



Patience with Ourselves 

being made, as if the battle were an 
endless round, without issue and without 
decision. And as there is no struggle so 
severe and exacting as that which a man 
has to make with himself, so there is no 
victory so noble as that which a man 
wins over himself; for the fact of struggle 
carries with it the possibiHty of victory. 
The spider, reweaving his shattered web 
for the twentieth time, follows an instinct 
which those who believe in the presence 
of God in the world believe to be divine. 
The man who rebuilds for the hundredth 
time his shattered purpose and reburn- 
ishes his tarnished ideal obeys an instinct 
from God and may count on God's help, 
in so far as his struggle is a sincere one. 
The severity of the struggle and its du- 
ration prophesy the permanency of the 
victory when it is at last won, as a long 
and exacting process of education implies 
a very high and unusual degree of pro- 
ficiency as its reward. Nothing is more 
difficult than to reform character ; but 
nothing is so permanent as character 
14 209 



Works and Days 

when it Is reformed. The inner struggle 
which gives Hfe its tremendous meaning 
and its dramatic interest is not only to 
the strong, the brilliant, and the versa- 
tile ; it is more often to those who bear 
patiently with their own weaknesses, and 
by patience with themselves secure the 
eternal victory. 



2IO 



GIVE AND TAKE 

PEOPLE of great strength of char- 
acter are often very difficult to 
Vive with. They are to be depended 
upon in storms, but they are disagreeable 
in calm weather. No one will under- 
estimate the value of those fundamental 
qualities of character upon which alone a 
genuine life or a sound and noble relation- 
ship of any sort is built ; but there is a 
great deal more of life than the founda- 
tions ; there is a whole superstructure 
of intercourse, relationship, emotions, 
recreation, and fellowship, and these 
varied and in a sense lighter things are 
really not less important than the graver 
things. Many a man who would go to 
the stake rather than be guilty of any 
act of dishonor does not hesitate to cru- 
cify those who are nearest him by unre- 
strained temper; many a woman capable 
of the highest acts of self-denial feels 



Works and Days 

herself under no obligation to control a 
tendency to irritability. But irritability 
may destroy the entire charm of associa- 
tion with the most gifted person, and un- 
governed temper has probably involved 
as much evil to the world in the long run 
as the direct temptations to sin. A great 
many men and women live as if there 
were no such things as differences of 
temperament ; they never take into con- 
sideration the moods of those with whom 
they deal, nor do they ever remember 
that they have moods of their own ; and 
yet moods have as much to do with 
making the aspect of life from day to 
day as the atmosphere has to do with the 
changing effects of the landscape. There 
are people to whom the world is one day 
brilliant with sunshine and the next 
sombre with shadows, and it is as absurd 
to ignore this difference as to ignore the 
changes of weather. The ability to 
communicate happiness and to aid others 
lies largely in the power of adaptation, 
in the keen perception of the tempera- 



212 



Give and Take 

ment and peculiarities of another, and in 
delicate consideration for temperament 
and quality. There is nothing more in- 
tangible than the sensitiveness of a child, 
and yet there are very few things more 
important. The future happiness and 
success of the child depend largely on 
the manner in which that sensitiveness is 
treated by those who stand nearest to it. 
Many a fine nature is spoiled by the 
clumsy or brutal hands of those who 
wreck it as ruthlessly as the hoof of a 
horse tramples on a rose, and yet whom 
nothing would tempt to commit any 
moral wrong against the child. We all 
demand much for ourselves from others ; 
let us be careful that we honor the 
demands of others upon ourselves. 



213 



WORK THAT NOURISHES 

ONE of the secrets of a life of 
growing power is to be nourished 
rather than depleted by one's work. 
Activity is healthful ; strain is harmful. 
Men do not die of overwork, but of 
maladjustment to the conditions of their 
work ; for under ripe conditions work 
develops just as truly as exercise, but 
under wrong conditions it depletes and 
destroys. The great workers of the 
world have accumulated force rather 
than parted with it, and have gathered 
richness of material and power of action 
by the putting forth of their energies ; 
so that their lives have moved toward 
culmination rather than come to an early 
fruition followed by a long dechne. It 
is easy to detect the difference between 
the man who is fed by his work and the 
man who is drained by it. There is an 
214 



Work that Nourishes 

ease, a force, and a zest about the work 
that nourishes which is never long char- 
acteristic of the work that depletes ; for 
the essential of the work which nourishes 
is its free and unimpeded expression of 
the personality of the worker. It is the 
overflow of his own personal energy, and 
not the strenuous putting forth of toil- 
some effort. It is significant that the 
great artists, as a rule, are immensely 
productive, Michael Angelo, Raphael, 
Rubens, Shakespeare, Scott, and men 
of their class, attest their genius not only 
by the quality of their work but by its 
quantity also. This means that they 
have secured the right adjustment to 
their conditions, and that work, instead 
of being a drain, nourishes and develops 
the worker. The man who works with 
dehght and ease grows by means of his 
activity, and the first secret to be learned 
in order to rid work of worry and wear is 
to take it in a reposeful spirit, to refuse to 
be hurried, to exchange the sense of being 
mastered by one's occupation for the 

21? 



Works and Days 

consciousness of mastery. To take work 
easily and quietly, not because one is in- 
different to it, but because one is fully 
equal to it, is to take the first step 
towards turning work into play. 



216 



NOT GETTING BUT GIVING 

WITH some exceptions due to 
special conditions, we ordinarily 
get what we deserve from our friends 
and from society; it is idle to charge 
upon others results due to our own 
limitations. Men will listen to the man 
who has something to say worth saying, 
and will honor and love the man who is 
worthy of honor and love. If society 
remains finally indifferent to claims made 
upon its attention, it is because those 
claims are not well founded. There is 
a constant tendency to shift upon others 
the responsibility which belongs to our- 
selves, and there are many people who 
cherish a grievance against their fellows 
because they are not taken at their own 
valuation. The public is accused of 
stupidity because it fails to recognize the 
political genius which some man finds in 
217 



Works and Days 

himself; editors are charged with prej- 
udice and partiality because they do not 
open their columns to contributors whose 
faith in their own gifts is independent of 
all confirmation from the opinions of 
others ; congregations are declared to be 
cold and unresponsive because they do 
not kindle to an eloquence which some- 
how evaporates between the pulpit and 
the pew ; friends are held to be in- 
different because they do not pour out 
confidences which can never be forced, 
but which flow freely only when they 
are drawn out by the subtle sympathy 
of kinship of nature. It is a false attitude 
which prompts us to be always demand- 
ing, and it defeats itself; we ought, 
rather, to be always giving. Our friends 
are powerless to bestow the confidence 
which does not instinctively flow to us, 
or to disclose to us those aspects of their 
lives which are not unconsciously turned 
to us. Friendship is a very dehcate and 
sensitive relation, and it is absurd to 
demand from it that which it does not 
218 



Not Getting but Giving 

freely give. We draw from a friend 
precisely that which we have the power 
to understand and enter into ; we are 
shut out from the things which are not 
naturally bur own. If society does not 
give us what we crave, and our friends 
do not open to us doors which stand 
wide to others, instead of indicting 
others' let us look well to ourselves. 
If we find ourselves losing in strength 
of position and influence, it will appear, 
if we search ourselves, that we are not 
keeping pace with the growth of those 
around us, and that we are losing ground 
in the world because we are losing force 
in ourselves. The whole attitude of 
those who are continually measuring the 
returns made to them by society and 
friends is pernicious ; we are here to give, 
not to get ; and they who give largely 
receive largely. 



219 



STRENGTH OUT OF 

WEAKNESS 

THERE are few things so difficult 
to bear as the consciousness of 
weakness. It is easy to struggle against 
our faults so long as they spring from 
some kind of vigor, and we are always 
lenient with ourselves in dealing with 
those offences which have their root in 
energy of nature. These faults do not 
discourage us, because we recognize in 
them a misdirected force, and we have 
faith in our power to give that force new 
and wiser direction ; but the conscious- 
ness of weakness brings a profound sense 
of discouragement. It involves the rec- 
ognition of a real defect in character, 
and it carries with it a sense of uncer- 
tainty with regard to the future. The 
man of strong will has the consciousness 
that the strength which has been mis- 



Strength out of Weakness 

guided may itself become a contributing 
force to the reorganization of his life, 
but the man of weak will knows that he 
has to struggle against a fundamental 
defect. For the weak, however, as for 
the strong, there is the same law of com- 
pensation, — the law under which every 
possible defect and weakness may be 
made a source of strength. To be con- 
scious of one's weakness is to put one's 
self in the way of receiving that which 
one lacks ; for the consciousness of 
weakness, if acted upon, means steady 
protection of ourselves against the temp- 
tations which overcome us, and in that 
very act the creation of a new kind of 
strength. The real measure of character 
is the amount of moral force produced 
rather than the moral achievement made. 
There are men of fundamental weakness 
who, in the struggle to right themselves, 
put forth an immense moral force, and 
by that very fact, although to others 
they seem to achieve little, they lift 
themselves out of their weakness into 



221 



Works and Days 

strength. The first step toward strength 
is the consciousness of weakness. If 
that consciousness be acted upon, as it 
may be even by the weakest, then what 
was weakness begins to give way to a 
new-born strength, and out of the very 
quahty which promised to destroy the 
hope of achievement often comes that 
moral virihty which makes the very 
highest achievements possible. It was 
the hand which signed the recantation 
that Cranmer held in the flames that it 
might be burned first. 



WAITING 

WAITING for one's chance in life 
is neither exhilarating nor in- 
spiring, but it is a much more com- 
mon experience than most men suspect. 
Nothing is so deceptive to the man who 
has not yet found his place as the ap- 
parently universal success of the men 
around him ; he seems solitary and 
alone, — an exception to the universal 
law ; he is stranded while all other men 
are being borne forward by an ample 
tide of prosperity. But the waiting 
man has a great deal more companion- 
ship than he suspects ; almost every one 
of the men whose careers fill him with a 
sort of envy has gone through the period 
through which he is now passing, and 
which he finds extremely painful and de- 
pressing. Very few men make a sym- 
metrical race of life ; they do not begin at 
the start and run steadily to the goal ; 
223 



Works and Days 

there are pauses, interruptions, uncertain- 
ties in the case of almost every runner 
before he really gets into the heat of the 
contest and begins to take the lead. And 
these are generally not to be regretted. 
Many a man looks back upon apparent 
losses of time and strength in after years 
and sees that, in his hour of uncertainty 
and waiting, there were developed in him 
an endurance, a definiteness of aim, and 
a patience which have contributed largely, 
often vitally, to his later success. 

Most young men, and especially young 
men of ample endowments of nature and 
mind, pass through this period of un- 
certainty. They are eager to enrol 
themselves in the great army of workers, 
but they are not quite sure to which 
branch of the service they belong. 
While other men are marching past 
with flying colors, they are compelled 
to stand idly by. Many a young man 
feels at such a moment as if life had 
deceived him, and he in turn had de- 
ceived himself and his friends. The 
224 



Waiting 

passing hour seems to him an eternal 
condition ; the momentary uncertainty 
a permanent disability. Such a mood 
is the only dangerous thing about this 
trying experience. There is nothing in 
the fact of being compelled to wait for 
one's opportunity, nothing in the fact of 
being undecided at the first as to one's 
life work, which should fill any man with 
disappointment. He has only to go to 
the successful men around him, and 
secure their confidence, to find that his 
experience is simply a repetition of theirs. 
The only danger comes from the begin- 
nings of despair ; a despair which some- 
times takes the most tragic forms, and 
sometimes creates a permanent disbelief 
in one's ability to attain the highest and 
best things. The young man who was 
compelled, on the eve of knighthood, to 
spend a solitary night within chapel 
walls, used those hours of isolation for 
the purification of his own soul in order 
that he might more successfully uphold 
the right and destroy the wrong. So 
15 225 



Works and Days 

every young man passing through the 
painful experience of uncertainty and 
waiting may find in it a surer knowledge 
of himself, and a stronger grasp on the 
certainties of life. 



226 



A BEAUTIFUL TALENT 

THERE are two maxims of Goethe's 
which contain the pure gold of 
truth in one of the most trying relations 
of life, — our relation to those who are 
developing gifts and capacities above us : 
" Against the great superiority of another 
there is no remedy but love ; " and " To 
praise a man is to put one's self on 
his level." In these brief and pithy say- 
ings is contained the whole philosophy 
of a noble attitude towards superiority 
of all kinds. There are many who can- 
not meet the test of having friends and 
associates pass them in the race by force 
of greater gifts, and who note the devel- 
opment of talent in others, if not with 
envy, at least with coldness and silence. 
In such an attitude there is not only a 
confession of defeat, but the loss of a 
great opportunity, — the loss that is 
always coming to the egotist. A gift 
227 



Works and Days 

of any kind is a resource added to life, 
a new contribution to the capital which 
makes society rich. The right-minded 
man rejoices when the common wealth 
increases, and finds delight in the work 
which brings in the added riches ; the 
fact that he lives in a modest house 
makes him all the more appreciative of 
the general beauty of the metropolis in 
which he is a citizen. Moreover, as 
Goethe suggests, we share in great gifts 
by recognizing and honoring them. To 
keep Shakespeare a closed volume be- 
cause we envy his marvellous power is 
not to harm Shakespeare but, to impov- 
erish ourselves ; to take delight in Shake- 
speare is to partake of his genius and 
put ourselves on his level. In like 
manner, to be the first to recognize a 
dawning superiority in some one who 
stands near us is not only to give our 
own nature a beautiful and worthy ex- 
pression, but to share in the develop- 
ment of a new and inspiring gift. The 
power of appreciation is itself a beautiful 
228 



A Beautiful Talent 

gift, and its culture means the possession 
of a talent as generous as it is beautiful. 
To possess it is to drive out the shadow 
of envy, and to give swift hospitality to 
truth and beauty. We reveal our own 
natures by our attitude towards superior- 
ity in others. 



229 



THE SUPREME SERVICE 

ONE of the heresies which mislead us 
is the belief that we are useful only 
when we are actually doing something 
with our hands and feet. The word " do- 
ing" is underscored in almost every man's 
practical philosophy of life ; the word 
"being" is generally written in small 
characters. No wise man will underrate 
the importance of activity, because every 
such man understands that there can be 
no real life which does not bear fruitage. 
But the tree does not live consciously 
for the sake of bearing fruit ; the fruit is 
the overflow of its vitality. We ought 
to live in the same fashion. Our chief 
concern ought to be to live deeply, richly, 
and nobly, and then activity will take 
care of itself No one can make the 
word " being" full of depth and meaning 
without also giving new depth and mean- 
ing to the word "doing." To be great 
230 



The Supreme Service 

implies the doing of great things, but 
no man becomes great by an activity 
outside of himself; he is, first of all, 
great in himself, and his activity is simply 
a revelation of his greatness. The first 
concern of us all is to be noble. The 
idea that activity is the only measure of 
usefulness constantly misleads superficial 
people who are continually doing things 
with very little thought and very little 
spiritual force, into the belief that they 
are attaining great spiritual growth ; 
while, on the other hand, it constantly 
misleads people who have small strength 
or small opportunities, and who can do 
but little with their hands and feet, into 
the belief that they are of very little use 
in life. The real measure of greatness is 
always an inward and spiritual measure. 
It is a test which cannot be evaded, 
which dissipates false standards and con- 
ventions like the mist, and gets at the 
very heart of character. The greatest 
service which any of us can render to 
our fellows is, first and foremost, to be 
231 



Works and Days 

so evidently strong, earnest, and cheerful 
that the discouraged take a new lease of 
hope from us, the doubtful secure a new 
vision of faith, and those who have fallen 
a new impulse to get on their feet again. 
It is of infinitely more importance to-day 
to pour a new tide of victorious faith and 
hope and strength into the souls of men 
than to do anything, anywhere. Beside 
this supreme service of feeding the spirit- 
ual life of the world, all doing, however 
magnificent, is comparatively insignifi- 
cant. The greatest servants of humanity 
are those who, by embodying a noble 
ideal of life, constantly reinforce the faith 
of those who are feebler in the possibility 
of such a life, reconcile them to the hard 
conditions of. their own existence, and 
inspire them with a faith which of them- 
selves they could not achieve. 



232 



LIVE IN TO-DAY 

THERE is no illusion so insidious 
and persistent as that which intro- 
duces into the future some element of luck, 
which stores up for us in the time to come 
something which we have not secured for 
ourselves. We are always dreaming of 
having more time in the future, and of 
doing things with a strong hand in con- 
sequence ; to-day we have but fifteen 
minutes, and what can be made of such 
a fragment of time ? Next year we shall 
have hours, and then we will read the 
new books, learn the languages we need 
to possess, accomplish the larger tasks 
of which we dream. But the hours 
never come, and the achievements are 
made, if they are made at all, in these 
odds and ends of time that come to us 
by the way. The wise man is he who 
knows the value of to-day ; he who can 
estimate to-day rightly may leave the 
233 



Works and Days 

future to take care of itself For the 
value of the future depends entirely upon 
the value attached to to-day ; there is no 
magic in the years to come ; nothing can 
bloom in those fairer fields save that 
which is sown to-day. The great aim 
of Christianity is not to teach men the 
glory of the life to come, but the sacred- 
ness of the life that now is; not to make 
men imagine the beauty of heaven, but 
to make them realize the divinity of 
earth ; not to unveil the splendor of the 
Almighty, enthroned among angels, but 
to reveal deity in the Man of Nazareth. 
He has mastered the secret of life who 
has learned the value of the present mo- 
ment, who sees the beauty of present 
surroundings, and who recognizes the 
possibilities of sainthood in his neigh- 
bors. To make the most and the best 
out of to-day is to command the highest 
resources of the future. For there is no 
future outside of us ; it lies within us, 
and we make it for ourselves. The 
heaven of the future, and the hell also, 
234 



Live in To-Day 

are in the germ in every human soul ; 
and no man is appointed to one or the 
other, for each appoints himself. To 
value to-day, to honor this life, to glorify 
humanity is to prepare for eternity, to 
seek the eternal life, and to worship God. 
The harvest of the future is but the 
golden ripening of to-day's sowing. 



235 



A HINT FROM A POEM 

IN Browning's " Saul," one of the 
great poems of recent times, there is 
a fine prophetic motive which gradually 
develops and becomes clearer until it is 
seen to be the dominant note of the 
poem. The simple shepherd, beginning 
his song with the most familiar things 
in order to distract the melancholy- 
king, is led on slowly, from strain to 
strain, the music deepening and widen- 
ing almost unconsciously until it bursts 
into the splendid psalm of prophecy ; 
then one becomes suddenly aware that 
this profounder music was latent in the 
earliest and simplest notes, and that it 
is this deep harmony which imparts a 
thrilling meaning to the whole. The 
poem is a beautiful parable of every true 
human life ; a parable which becomes 
more clear and true the more deeply 
we study it and the more thoroughly 
236 



A Hint from a Poem 

we understand our own lives. Every 
human life begins in association with the 
most familiar and, apparently, the most 
trivial things. All its earlier activity is 
mere play ; but from the first hour its 
little life, like a stream flowing seaward, 
deepens and broadens ; the play becomes 
educational ; the instincts are gradually 
turned into intelligence ; familiar and 
obvious things become new and strange 
because seen through fresh experience ; 
finally play becomes work, but work 
which has still the element of play in it 
because of the spontaneity and freshness 
of youth ; then come the strain, the 
responsibilities, the strenuous and un- 
broken toil of maturity. The mere 
thoughtless joy of purely physical vital- 
ity has gone out of it ; pressure and 
gain, great cares and heavy burdens have 
come into it. The earlier and melo- 
dious notes are no longer heard. But 
if life has been taken seriously and 
earnestly, the first melody has given 
place to an ever-deepening harmony ; 
237 



Works and Davs 

living becomes more solemn and awful, 
not because so much has been lost, but 
because its possibilities are seen to be so 
measureless. And now, if one has ears 
to hear and eyes to see, the prophetic 
element becomes more and more definite. 
It is no longer time in which a man 
is working when this deeper harmony 
sounds in his heart ; it is eternity. As 
he looks back he sees clearly that from 
the first careless playtime of childhood 
this deeper music has always been latent, 
these profounder notes have formed an 
undertone which has at last become, not 
only audible, but dominant. There are 
times when it would be pleasant to es- 
cape the solemnity of life ; when we 
should delight to recall, if we could, the 
simple joy and pleasure of childhood, 
with its near hopes, and its immediate 
aims. But since this is no longer pos- 
sible, even if it were wise, why not take 
the profound and sustaining joy which 
comes with the deeper truth, constantly 
breaking into the consciousness through 
238 



A Hint from a Poem 

all our experience, that this hard and at 
times terrible education is the preparation 
for something greater than we had ever 
thought of, the glory of which would 
blind us if it were to break upon us ? 
We began, like David, with the song of 
the water bubbling in the brook, and the 
wind playing on the grass, and the sheep 
browsing on the hills ; let us end, like 
his song, with the sublime vision of a 
life redeemed and purified, — a life typi- 
fied by the Christ. 



239 



THE CORRUPTION OF 
SELF-PITY 

SELF-PITY is the most elusive and 
deceptive form of selfishness ; it be- 
guiles the most acute mind which yields 
to it, and disintegrates the clearest judg- 
ment if it becomes a habit. It is a kind 
of sentimentalism which finds its food in 
our vanity and grows by what it feeds 
on. It seems like a consolation for our 
mistakes and misfortunes, but it really is 
an anodyne which protects us from a 
pain that is essential to health. When 
we blunder and fail, we ought to suffer, 
since suffering puts us on the road to a 
recovery of what we have lost, or to the 
conquest of that which we have not had 
the strength to grasp. What we need 
is the tonic of a relentlessly honest deal- 
ing with ourselves. If we have been 
weak, small, mean, we need to know our 
defects and call them by names that ac- 
240 



The Corruption of Self-Pity 

curately describe them. If we have not 
secured the approbation we crave, we 
ought, for character's sake, frankly and 
fully to accept the fact that we have 
missed the approbation because we have 
not done the work that would have won 
it. If we deal with ourselves in this 
spirit, we pay ourselves the highest re- 
spect and put ourselves in the way of 
being worthy of it. 

Too many of us do nothing of the 
kind. We begin to pity ourselves, to 
look upon others as ungenerous and un- 
sympathetic, to lay the responsibility for 
our failures on some person or circum- 
stance. We soon come to think of our- 
selves as martyrs and victims ; we build 
up a fictitious character for ourselves ; 
we create unreal sorrows and bear unreal 
wrongs. We end by corrupting and de- 
bilitating ourselves to such a degree that 
we cease to have a clear vision, a truth- 
ful tongue, or a loyal heart. To put 
the result of a course of self-pity in plain 
speech : we deceive ourselves so long 
i6 241 



Works and Days 

and so persistently that we become 
chronic liars to ourselves and chronic 
slanderers of others ; and it is an awful 
thing to become an incarnate lie in a 
universe which is relentlessly truthful. 



242 



THE REAL POWER IN LIFE 

THERE is no mechanism so delicate 
as the adjustment of forces which 
make up a human Hfe. The most ex- 
quisite mechanical adaptations represent 
but grossly the fineness of moral, intel- 
lectual, and physical adjustments which 
are ultimately secured in every human 
life. If we could only realize for one 
hour how subtle, manifold, and exacting 
are the influences which shape us, there 
would be far less trifling with the serious 
concerns of character. If we could really 
feel that every sin, every negligence, 
every neglect, involves either a perma- 
nent or a passing loss of power, and that 
we are absolutely powerless to sever our- 
selves from the causes which we set in 
motion, we should walk with very care- 
ful feet. That which gives us the power 
of impressing our fellows is not so much 
the conscious direction of our abilities as 
243 



Works and Days 

the unconscious expfession of ourselves. 
It is character in its continuous revela- 
tion which gives or denies us the power 
we seek with others. There is no possi- 
bility of concealing one's real self; it 
will discover itself, and in that discovery, 
constantly going on, lies our chief influ- 
ence, either for good or ill. The only 
way to make the most of ourselves is to 
hold ourselves in perfect humility to loy- 
alty and obedience. There is a greater 
power behind us, ready to be expressed 
through us, than we can comprehend. 
Men who take their lives into their own 
hands, who obey or disobey as they 
choose, and use their gifts as forces which 
they can, in a way, detach from them- 
selves, are continually coming to failure, 
if not to positive disaster. It was once 
said of a public man of great intellectual 
force, but exceedingly questionable moral 
character, who was put upon his defence 
by certain charges, that when he stood 
on his feet and spoke for himself it 
seemed as if no evidence could convict 
244 



The Real Power in Life 

him, but when he sat down and was 
silent, it seemed as if he had no friends 
and no defence. This man had detached 
his gifts from his character. When he 
could employ them consciously he made 
an impression, but the moment he was 
silent, his power was gone. There was 
no unconscious atmosphere of truth and 
integrity about him. His character be- 
lied his gifts. We ought so to live that 
the great purpose behind us may work 
itself out through us, and that, whether 
speaking or silent, whether working 
or at rest, the unconscious atmosphere 
which we carry with us may breathe 
purity, fideHty, and loyalty. 



245 



THE GRACE OF OPPOR- 
TUNITY 

THERE are no men or women who 
owe more to themselves and their 
fellows than those to whom opportunities 
are constantly coming, before whom 
doors are constantly opened. Such a lot 
is the highest of all good fortunes, since 
it means not only success, but growth ; 
not only talent, but the possibilities of 
character. There is a patient host who 
work on, day after day, with no hope of 
large advancement, no stimulus of marked 
progress, and no inspiration of wider 
outlook ; who must find their reward in 
the consciousness of work well done, and 
possess their hearts in patience, as far as 
their aspirations and ambitions are con- 
cerned. Many a man is conscious of a 
larger power than circumstances afford 
him the room to put forth ; and it in- 
volves no small strain on character to 
246 



The Grace of Opportunity 

accept such limitations cheerfully, and 
to recognize the progress of those who 
are more fortunately placed, not only 
without envy, but with a generous pleas- 
ure. He who can do this has a heroic 
strain in him. 

To those, therefore, into whose hands 
the golden keys are put, there come not 
only great satisfactions but great respon- 
sibilities. If such an one is tempted to 
find the secret of his success in himself, 
let him consider well what his circum- 
stances have been, and let him think 
always of the nobler men who are bound 
in creeks and shallows while he spreads 
his sail on the open sea. Every new 
opportunity should send a man to his 
knees instead of lifting him up in his 
own mind, should give him additional 
poise and balance instead of access of van- 
ity. Nothing is more painful than the 
spectacle of one whom a little success 
makes self-conscious and inflated, so that 
the larger the success which comes the 
plainer becomes his essential weakness. 
247 



Works and Days 

On the other hand, there is nothing 
which comforts those who are striving 
with adverse conditions so entirely as the 
untainted and unspoiled spirit which re- 
ceives success as a trust, not as a reward, 
and bears it as a possession to be divided 
rather than hoarded. 



248 



FORGETTING THE THINGS 
THAT ARE BEHIND 

AN army which is to move rapidly 
and strike swift, decisive blows 
carries as little baggage as possible. It 
leaves all impedimenta in the rear, and 
relies for its safety upon its ability to 
move with sufficient rapidity and force 
to overcome obstacles. An old-time 
Oriental army carried with it every sort of 
convenience and luxury; a modern Occi- 
dental army discards everything but the 
weapons and the supplies which equip it 
for action. There are a great many 
people who move encumbered with as 
much impedimenta as the Persian armies 
which the Greeks once destroyed. They 
leave nothing behind them ; their mis- 
takes, blunders, and failures are carried 
along from day to day as if they were 
priceless possessions instead of being 
249 



Works and Days 

shells which ought to have been thrown 
by the wayside long ago, after the fruit 
of experience has been taken from them. 
There is a grace in forgetting as well as 
in remembering ; there is a genius in 
knowing what to discard as well as what 
to keep ; and both these are the invari- 
able possession of a successful and effi- 
cient life. No man of conscience can 
forget his sins; no man of judgment can 
forget his mistakes ; but he does not 
carry them with him. What he does 
carry is the experience which has come 
to him through them, — the strength, the 
wisdom, the grace of character, which 
have been developed by what they have 
brought or what they have taken away. 

A man's real life is always before him ; 
the past is only valuable for what we can 
learn from it. The days fade from all 
distinct recollection because these artifi- 
cial divisions of time are of no conse- 
quence except as character has grown or 
degenerated in them. A man's greatest 
achievement, once accomplished, begins 
250 



Forgetting Things that are Behind 

immediately to recede and become less 
and less in his eyes. No really great 
man has ever reposed on anything which 
he has done ; there has always been the 
consciousness that he was greater than 
any expression he had given of himself, 
and that the real satisfaction and joy of 
his life lay, not in the work, but in 
the doing of it. One task succeeds 
another, one experience follows another, 
in endless succession ; a man*s work is 
never finally done, because his life is 
always expanding ; and the time will 
never come when this law of progression 
will cease to operate. There can be no 
heaven which is not a heaven of develop- 
ment. It is a great waste of strength to 
make one*s faults and blunders and sin 
impedimenta in the onward march. 
There is no virtue in continually be- 
moaning the misdoings of the past. 
Real repentance is not lamentation, but 
girding up the loins for the work of 
expiation. Let the dead old year bury 
its dead ; leave behind the depressing 
251 



Works and Days 

memories of failure and defeat, while you 
carry their lessons in your heart. Your 
real life is not behind, but before you ; 
it is the new year and not the old which 
is your opportunity. 



252 



BELIEVE IN YOUR WORK 

THE English governor of one of 
the provinces of the British Em- 
pire in India, commenting on his good 
fortune in getting out of the country 
before the breaking out of the Mutiny, 
said : " I could never have fought well, 
for I could never make up my mind 
whether our conquest of India was a 
divinely inspired act or a great dacoity." 
The remark showed sound knowledge 
of life. No man can fight vigorously 
and successfully if he is uncertain of his 
right to fight. The soldier who leaves 
behind him the open question whether 
a thing ought to be done or not, in nine 
cases out of ten will retreat along that 
line. The advance line is held only by 
the man who believes in the end that lies 
before him, and in his right to secure 
that end. Nothing blights faith in a 
purpose, or saps the strength to carry 
253 



Works and Days 

it out like skepticism. The skepticism 
need not be very deep or very radical ; a 
very little of it will go a long way in de- 
stroying a man's working power. It is 
one of the mental and spiritual misfor- 
tunes of our time that so many men and 
women are uncertain whether the thing 
they are doing is worth while. They are 
fighting a losing battle, not because they 
have not the force or the equipment to 
fight a winning one, but because they can 
never quite make up their minds whether 
the fight ought to be made or not. A 
half-hearted or questioning Stanley would 
be an absurdity. The man who is to 
cross Africa through the heart of its vast 
forests and its deadly morasses must be 
a man who believes that doing that par- 
ticular thing is worth every exertion that 
a human being can make, and that if his 
life goes into the work the loss will be 
well made. No smaller faith than this 
could have given Stanley the impulse 
which sent him through the heart of 
Africa. If Mr. Edison spent his nights 
254 



Believe in Your Work 

in querying whether his work by day was 
worth the doing, the wonderful develop- 
ment of the practical use of electricity 
which he has secured for the benefit 
of men would never have been made. 
Doubt is a healthy stage in the life of 
every man who thinks, but it is only 
a stage, not a permanent condition. 
Sooner or later the man who achieves 
anything in life leaves doubt behind him 
and puts his hand in the resolute grasp 
of a clean, clear, triumphant faith in 
some cause or purpose, or principle or 
aim. When we stop to ask ourselves 
whether life is worth living, we ought 
at once to call in the family physician ; 
that question means disease either of 
body or mind ; it is a question which no 
healthy man or woman has any business 
to ask. 



255 



EARN YOUR SUCCESS 

ONE of the most futile things in life 
is the attempt to make men fill 
places for which they are not fitted, or to 
do work to which they are not equal. 
There are few things which cause so 
much disappointment and general irri- 
tation as the mistaken acts of friendship 
which push a man higher than he can 
stand, and, in a blind desire to serve him, 
load him down with responsibilities which 
he cannot bear. A true friendship is 
always wise and candid. It recognizes 
the limitations of one whom it would 
aid, and does not endeavor to pass over 
those limitations and set at naught that 
general law of life which establishes an 
affinity between a man's capacity and the 
work he is to do. There is, in fact, 
very little that friendship can do for a 
man beyond securing him a good oppor- 
256 



Earn Your Success 

tunity ; it cannot, with the best intentions 
and the utmost zeal, make him equal to 
the opportunity. Friendship stands at 
the door and holds it open, but it can- 
not make him who enters at home in 
a new place unless there is that within 
himself which makes it possible for him 
to adapt himself to his new surroundings. 
There are a great many men who seem 
to think that, by the assistance of their 
friends, all things are possible to them, 
and who hold their friends responsible 
for their failure to secure the places and 
emoluments which they believe are their 
due. Such persons are entirely ignorant 
of that great law of life which imposes 
upon each man the necessity of working 
out his own salvation. Character can 
never be formed by deputy, nor can 
great works be done, great responsi- 
bilities met, and great results realized, by 
delegation to another. For our oppor- 
tunities we may well look to our friends; 
for our successful dealing with our op- 
portunities we must look to ourselves. 
17 257 



Works and Days 

Friendship can pu<" a man in the right 
place and give him the proper tools, but 
it cannot direct his work, nor can it bring 
out the skill which Nature has denied or 
which inefficiency has refused to acquire. 
There is a broad justice running 
through life which is only the more 
apparent because one sometimes finds 
exceptions to it. As a rule, men achieve 
the success which they deserve, and ob- 
tain the places for which they are fitted. 
There are some who, by the accidents 
of the time in which they live, are 
thwarted of results which might properly 
have been theirs under more favorable 
conditions ; but the great majority of 
those who fail are responsible for their 
failures. Their intentions may have been 
good, but they have lacked either the wise 
discernment of their duties or the resolute 
industry which turns opportunity into 
achievement. A Napoleon without social 
or political backing will somehow come 
to the head of the army and will use 
it as if it were a part of himself; a 
258 



Earn Your Success 

McClellan, with the best Intentions in 
the world and the most sincere patriot- 
ism, when every possible instrument of 
success is put into his hand, will remain 
paralyzed and, to a large degree, impo- 
tent. He had the opportunity, but it 
was too great for him ; and, in the light 
of history it is seen to be a misfortune 
that he was advanced to a place which he 
could not hold, and from which he could 
not progress. All that we can ask justly 
from our most devoted friends is that 
they shall help us to the possession of 
the things we need to work with. When 
they have done that, we can ask nothing 
more of them which they can wisely 
render to us. If we fail, the responsi- 
bility is upon us and not upon them. 
Neither their love, their services, nor 
their resources can fit us for positions 
to which Nature, or our own inefficiency 
has not made us equal. It is easy to 
lay to our souls the flattery of having 
been defeated by forces against which 
no human will could have striven suc- 
259 



Works and Days 

cessfully, or to have been thwarted in our 
effort to work out whatever is in us by 
lack of opportunities; but if we analyze 
the causes of our failure honestly, we shall 
generally find that they have been due to 
some defect in ourselves — a defect which 
could not have been remedied by all the 
friendship and co-operation in the world, 
and a defect which ought not to have 
been remedied by any one but ourselves. 
There is a fundamental immorality in the 
attainment of success for which a man 
has not striven ; there is an element of 
falsehood in the holding of a place which 
has not come to one as a recognition of 
his ability to fill it. Better a thousand 
times obscurity and humble work than 
prominence or opulence gained by acci- 
dent or secured by favor. There is a 
kind of aid which it is immoral for a 
friend to give and equally immoral for 
another to receive ; it is the aid which 
takes the place of some work we ought 
to have done, some energy we ought to 
have put forth, some strength and power 



Earn Your Success 

of character we ought to have attained. 
No success is real or lasting, or worth 
having which does not come as the out- 
ward recognition of some inward quality 
in the man who achieves it. 



261 



"LIGHT IN THE SHADOW 

THERE is nothing comparable in 
interest with the development of a 
human life. The love of biography, so 
widely diffused, bears constant testimony 
to the recognition by men at large of the 
supreme importance of the unfolding of 
personal character. The story of the 
man who begins with small opportunities 
in boyhood, and, by patience, integrity, 
courage, and submission, comes at last 
to great place, noble character, and large 
usefulness, is the one story in which 
men never lose their interest, and which 
constantly recreates hope and ambition 
in struggling and despondent souls. Such 
a story not only teaches the lesson of 
the power of steadfast purpose and con- 
tinuous energy, but always bears witness 
to the presence of something behind the 
man, greater than he, wiser, more far- 
seeing; something which takes into ac- 
262 



Light in the Shadow 

count the largest possibilities of his 
nature and which, by hope, by impulse, 
and by pressure, pushes him constantly 
onward. In every great career two 
elements are combined — the element of 
powerful personality, and the element of 
strength, of plan, and of energy outside 
and above the man. 

Looking at a successful career from 
the outside, it seems as if the course of 
such a career were perfectly plain ; as 
if the man saw from the beginning what 
he could attain to, and so, because he 
saw the remote end, was able to sur- 
mount cheerfully all obstacles, to pass 
through all difficulties, and to maintain 
an unshaken courage in all adversities. 
But this is really never the case. There 
are times in the lives of the greatest men 
when aims become indistinct, when hopes 
wither and courage faints ; times when 
the man works, not because he sees 
whither he is going, or what he shall 
accomplish, but simply in blind reliance 
or in desperate resolution. It is these 
263 



Works and Days 

dark experiences, common to all men, 
great and small, which seem to serve as 
avenues of access to heart and mind for 
the deepest teaching of life. When a 
man's career is taken out of his own 
hands, when the consciousness of weak- 
ness is borne on him so strongly that he 
feels as if the very foundations had failed, 
there often comes with this absolute 
giving up of all resource in one's self 
the vision of a greater power, the 
glimpse of a diviner purpose in which 
the individual life is folded and toward 
the realization of which it is borne 
irresistibly forward. The supreme com- 
fort of life lies in this clear perception 
of the tremendous educative power and 
purpose behind it — an influence which 
no man can escape, and which he can 
defeat only by his own infidelity. It 
is a great thing to feel, when our own 
small plans are in a moment destroyed, 
our own ambitions in a moment thwarted 
forever, that, instead of losing, we are 
exchanging a lower for a higher thing; 
264 



Light in the Shadow 

that the fall of the blossom means the 
coming of the fruit. An educative 
process is always a painful one, in- 
volving constant self-denial, self-sur- 
render, self-abnegation ; but there is 
nothing in life that so dignifies and 
ennobles a man ; nothing which in the 
end crowns him with such enduring 
success. One can well afford to stand 
at times, baffled and heartsick, to feel 
that nothing is certain, that one's plans 
and hopes may in an instant be blotted 
out, if with this sense of weakness there 
also comes the sense that a higher power 
is directing one's career, and that through 
these painful experiences the unseen God 
is transforming a lower into a higher 
conception of life, opening up a soul to 
new and greater truth, and lifting one 
through shadow into his own light. 



265 



THE WASTE OF FRICTION 

UNDOUBTEDLY a great many 
people overwork, but there are a 
great many sins laid on the shoulders of 
work which ought to be bound on the 
back of friction. Friction kills ten men 
where overwork kills one ; friction de- 
stroys freshness, wastes energy, spends 
courage, and induces failure. Except in 
cases where personal adjustments are 
absolutely necessary, friction is pure 
waste, serves no purpose, accomplishes 
no result, and is so much capital of 
health, strength, high spirit, and good 
working power thrown away. It is safe 
to say that no great enterprise ever 
succeeded in which friction was not re- 
duced to a minimum, because friction in- 
volves necessarily defective organization 
or antagonistic methods and plans. The 
home in which friction is a permanent 
element is a caricature of a real home, 
266 



The Waste of Friction 

It is a home without repose, without 
cheerfulness, without that atmosphere of 
confidence, sweetness, and sacrifice which 
is to all the best and noblest interests of 
the family what the air is to plants and 
men. Incidental and occasional friction 
are inevitable ; continuous friction means 
bad organization, unsympathetic workers, 
or the presence of obstinacy, stupidity, 
or wilfulness. Wherever it exists it 
ought to be taken as an indication that 
there is something wrong, and as a sug- 
gestion that it is time to examine the 
situation and remove the obstacle. In 
most cases the observance of a few simple 
principles will eliminate this exasperating 
source of weakness and failure. 

It is useless for people to try to ac- 
complish a common result without mu- 
tual confidence in one another. If a man 
lacks confidence in his partners he would 
better dissolve the partnership and form 
new business connections ; if a man lacks 
confidence in his friends, he would better 
examine himself to see whether he is 
267 



Works and Days 

worthy of association with them, and if 
he can satisfy his mind on that point he 
would better cease intercourse with them 
rather than carry it on at the expense of 
that good understanding which is the 
basis of all true friendship. A friendship 
accompanied by incessant irritation will 
sooner or later come to an end, and the 
sooner that end is reached the better. 
Mutual confidence is the only sound and 
healthy basisfor co-operation in any enter- 
prise. When we cease to have confidence 
in one another, it is time that the con- 
nection should be broken. 

Thorough-going sympathy makes fric- 
tion impossible, and is at the same time 
the foundation rock on which all great 
success is builded. No man can co- 
operate, heart and soul, with another 
unless he has sympathy with his aims 
and spirit. He cannot even understand 
what those aims and spirit are without 
the power to put himself in the other's 
place and see things from his point of 
view. Great enterprises go through to 
26S 



The Waste of Friction 

success when men come into full sym- 
pathy with one another in their devotion 
to a great purpose. Such a sympathy is 
a silent but infallible interpreter between 
men who may differ in many points, urge 
diverse methods, even possess antago- 
nistic temperaments, and yet be perfectly 
harmonious through their agreement in 
some central purpose. 

Every great work is, in a certain sense, 
a compromise. No man is able to 
achieve a great thing with his own un- 
aided hand. At some point or another 
he needs the help of others, and when he 
needs that help he must concede some- 
thing to secure it. It is only under a 
despotism, or under some form of slavery 
that one man arbitrarily imposes his will 
on another. In that case there is no 
friction, because there is no individuality, 
no consciousness of manhood, no barrier 
of self-respect. Mutual concessions are 
the price which men must pay for co- 
operation, and in the end they gain more 
than they lose ; for many a man who 
269 



Works and Days 

has genius for ideas is helpless without 
the practical skill which can give them 
shape and form. In the shaping and 
forming, the idea is generally modified to 
advantage. 

Men who work together and without 
friction must respect one another. There 
is nothing which creates so effective an 
esprit de corps^ which develops so 
thorough a discipline, as the common 
respect of each man for the place, re- 
sponsibilities, and authority of every 
other man. 



270 



DISCIPLINE OF HINDRANCE 

THERE is an instinctive feeling in 
the heart of every man that he has 
a right to a clear opportunity to do his 
work in the world and bring out in full 
measure whatever force there is in him. 
It is this instinct which resents the ob- 
struction of obstacles as something 
foreign to life, as accidents which break 
up the general order of things, as useless 
interferences which weaken effort, de- 
lay achievement, and exhaust strength. 
Every man craves a free field for his 
work, and a clear opportunity for his 
talent. If these are granted he is confi- 
dent of the success which would crown 
his efforts ; if these are secured he is cer- 
tain of the useful and victorious life 
which he will lead. Every energy and 
gift contains within it an impulse for 
action. The man who discovers in 
271 



Works and Days 

himself the ability to write feels that the 
opportunity to write ought to be given 
to him ; the man who develops a gift for 
oratory craves the opportunity of the 
platform, and feels wronged if he does 
not secure it ; the man who is conscious 
of great executive force demands an 
ample field in which to exercise it, and 
feels defrauded if he does not secure it. 
Behind every gift there is usually an 
energy sufficient to send it with the im- 
pulsion which powder gives to the ball. 

If success in life lay entirely in the 
working out of one's gifts symmetri- 
cally, and in doing one's work with the 
completeness and finish of a fine piece 
of mechanism, obstacles and limitations 
would be interferences with the normal 
order of things, obstructions thrown in 
the way of the runner which ought not to 
be there. But real success is not a matter 
of complete and symmetrical achieve- 
ment ; it is the outcome of a man's life 
when the normal force within him is 
measured against the difficulties he has 
272 



Discipline of Hindrance 

to overcome. These obstacles, which 
seem so unnecessary, these constantly re- 
curring, vexatious, and often meaningless 
interruptions, serve a high moral purpose 
in our lives. There is no business, pro- 
fession, or art which is not beset by 
them. In one of his most interesting 
and suggestive chapters Mr. Hamerton 
emphasizes the moral qualities which 
the technical difficulties in painting bring 
out in an artist. Instead of being able, 
without flaw, interruption, or break in 
the effort to put on canvas the perfect 
representation of the ideal picture in his 
own soul, the artist is obliged to over- 
come all manner of small, vexatious diffi- 
culties in the mere mechanical work of 
putting his vision into a visible form. 
But in surmounting these difficulties, 
vexatious as they are, the vision becomes 
clearer, the purpose stronger, the will 
steadier ; and when the work is done, 
there is a moral as well as an artistic 
quality in it. Interruptions and obstacles 
arising from the details which abound in 
i8 273 



Works and Days 

every occupation, which grow out of diffi- 
culties of personal adjustment, out of 
variations of physical condition, out of 
changing moods and diverse tempera- 
ments, are vexatious and exhausting, but 
they play a great part in our lives, and 
the spirit in which we meet them largely 
determines our character. Many a man 
puts forth more moral strength in remov- 
ing obstacles from his path than another 
puts forth in achieving the highest dis- 
tinction. In such a case, who shall say 
that the man whose whole effort has been 
spent in clearing his way has not done as 
much and won as noble a success as he 
who has run with swift and unencum- 
bered feet to the goal at the end ^ 



274 



THE LIMITS OF HELP- 
FULNESS 

FRIENDSHIP Is not only one of 
the greatest delights and resources 
in life, but it offers some of the finest 
opportunities which fall to the lot of 
man. No man can feel poor or entirely 
bereft so long as he has faithful friends ; 
no man can feel that he has made a 
failure of life so long as he is able to 
attach strong, high-minded men and 
women to himself. But friendship, like 
all the other good gifts of life, ought to 
be accepted rather for what one can put 
into it than for what one can get out of 
it. There are times when we must lean 
heavily on our friends, — when we can 
do nothing for them and they can do 
much for us. But the normal attitude 
of every man toward his friends ought 
to be that of giving rather than of get- 
275 



Works and Days 

ting, of serving rather than of being 
served. It is of the first importance that 
the service we render our friends shall 
be intelligent, — not simply a blind at- 
tempt to help in ways which are essen- 
tially unhelpful. It is often said that 
nothing requires so much wisdom as the 
bestowal of money ; it might be added 
that few things require greater tact and 
judgment than the rendering of the ser- 
vices of friendship. 

A really noble friendship, which real- 
izes the higher ideals of the relation, 
must be open-eyed ; friendship ought 
never to lose its sight. Our friendship 
is really helpful to others, not when it 
makes things easy for them, gratifying 
their desires and yielding to their humors, 
but when it develops the best that is in 
them ; when it puts them on their mettle, 
makes their weaknesses clear, and spurs 
them to the acquirement of the strength 
which overcomes. " Our friends," said 
Emerson, with characteristic insight, " are 
those who make us do what we can." 
276 



The Limits of Helpfulness 

Our real friend is not the man or woman 
who smoothes over our difficulties, 
throws a cloak over our failings, stands 
between us and the penalties which our 
mistakes have brought upon us ; but 
the man or woman who makes us under- 
stand ourselves and helps us to better 
things. It is a great mistake to be 
fettered by the weaknesses of our friends, 
to accept their limitations as our own, 
and, by yielding to their moods and 
narrowness, to circumscribe our own 
life. No healthy nature is willing to 
allow another to take toward it the re- 
lation of a parasite ; a healthy nature 
demands health in others ; it is willing 
to bear any number of burdens for others, 
to put its strength in the place of an- 
other's weakness ; but it is never will- 
ing that another should come so to rely 
upon it that the life of that other is 
dwarfed and enfeebled. A self-respecting 
friendship demands that there shall be 
equality between the two who are bound 
by it ; that each shall give as well as re- 
277 



Works and Days 

ceive, and that each shall furnish a part 
of the capital of the mutual investment. 
If our friends press too closely upon our 
individuality, our privacy, or our work, 
it is the part of friendship to repel the 
intrusion. There are certain limits be- 
yond which even friendship cannot go ; 
when it does, it has become morbid and 
unhealthy, and is debilitating alike to 
him who leans and to him who supports. 
That which a true friendship longs 
for and strives to achieve is the growth 
of power and freedom in another. It 
will not hesitate to give pain because it 
must be based on truth. Drawn upon 
sometimes for self-pity, it will not shrink 
from the sting which arouses energy and 
dignity ; it will have too much respect 
for another to permit in that other any 
decline from the dignity of a true per- 
sonality, from the independence which 
belongs to real character. It will not 
permit itself to be made the tool of 
another's weakness, the slave of another's 
humor; it will resolutely hold its own. 
278 



The Limits of Helpfulness 

The truest hospitality sometimes consists 
in locking the door, and the truest friend- 
ship sometimes involves absolute unre- 
sponsiveness to an appeal that ought 
never to have been made. If you wish 
to serve your friend, help him to be self- 
supporting, but do not let him become 
dependent upon you. Sting him, if 
necessary, into the consciousness of his 
own weaknesses, even if it cost his good- 
will. The surrender of a friendship for 
such a reason may sometimes be the 
highest evidence of its purity and no- 
biUty. 



279 



HEALTHY DISCONTENT 

THERE is a discontent which para- 
lyzes and destroys ; a discontent 
with one's conditions and circumstances 
which makes one restless, bitter, and in- 
efficient. This is always a moral disease 
to be avoided,- as any other contagion is 
avoided, and to be cured as any other 
disease is cured. But there is another 
kind of discontent which is a spur to 
excellence and an inspiration to achieve- 
ment — discontent with one's self. No 
man ought to be contented with himself, 
to be satisfied with the work he has done 
and the place he has secured. It is the 
prevalence of self-content in these matters 
that gives us so many average men and 
women, so many commonplace persons 
who mistake their prejudices for convic- 
tions and their ignorance for knowledge ; 

men and women who desire no other 
280 



Healthy Discontent 

authority for a statement than that they 
believe it, and who see no truth in the 
world which does not belong to them. 
This kind of self-sufficiency breeds ego- 
tism, narrowness, and ends in absolute 
arrest of development. No man can 
grow who is satisfied with himself The 
open-minded man is never free from the 
feeling that he has not done as much as 
he ought, and that his future must redeem 
by its increased usefulness and activity a 
past in which he has failed to do the best 
and the most for himself and for others. 
It would be found, if one could look 
into the hearts of the men and women 
whose course through life is a steady 
progression upward, that a divine dis- 
content is forever present in aspiring 
spirits. Those who rise are never satis- 
fied with themselves, but are always find- 
ing defects, faults, and failures to humble 
them and to make them more strenuous 
In that which lies before them. It is a 
great mistake to be always telling per- 
sons and nations that they have attained 



Works and Days 

great things, and that they have made 
some approach to perfection. The kind 
of criticism Mr. Arnold gave us is a 
great deal truer and more helpful than 
the adulation and undiscriminating com- 
mendation which some other travellers 
have given us. Recognition of work 
done is a spur and a help ; but there 
ought always to go with commendation, 
both to persons and to peoples, a clear 
setting forth of the better things still to 
be done. "The love of doing and the 
scorn of done " is the only safe feeling. 



282 



LOVE AND WORK 

LOVE and work are often far apart 
in our thoughts, but it is only when 
they are united that the highest results 
are achieved. Duty and necessity will 
make men faithful, but never inspire 
them. Love, on the other hand, adds 
to absolute fidelity a glow and inspiration 
which are creative. Those who have 
studied Corot's skies, deep and tender 
with an unfathomable light, have often 
wondered why this artist alone of all his 
contemporaries has mastered the secret 
of the morning sky. But they have 
ceased to wonder when they read of the 
passion for the sky of the dawn which 
possessed the great painter, and led him, 
morning after morning, year after year, 
into the open fields, to sit there, absorbed 
and enchanted, while the night slowly 
changed to day about him. Corot loved 
283 



Works and Days 

the dawn, 'and the dawn inspired him as 
It has inspired no other artist. It is the 
absence of love which makes most work 
drudgery. A good deal of that which is 
put by necessity into men's hands to do 
cannot of itself evoke this feeling ; there 
is nothing in it which touches the imagi- 
nation or appeals to the emotions. When 
the work itself does not possess these 
qualities, it can still be done in the spirit 
which inspires them. A man may love 
life and all that it brings him in the way 
of opportunity with such intensity and 
whole-heartedness that the meanest detail 
of it comes to have meaning and beauty 
in his eyes. All great workers who have 
achieved the very highest results and 
have stamped their performances with 
individuality and distinction, have been 
men of a mighty passion ; they have 
been enchanted by the thing they were 
doing ; and their devotion to it, their 
absorption in it, have betrayed the marks 
of a great affection. 

There is a great deal of work, how- 
284 



Love and Work 

ever, given to men to do which is capable 
of calling out the deepest sentiment of 
love, which has in it suggestions for the 
intellect, appeals to the imagination, out- 
looks for usefulness, sufficient to lay a 
spell on the greatest nature that ever 
handled tools. So, no one can doubt 
who looks at his canvases, did the work 
of painting appeal to Raphael ; so, un- 
questionably, did the work of writing 
throw its spell over the great soul who 
passed through three worlds in order that 
he might see man in all the conditions 
of his estate. The same mighty passion 
is found in the achievement of every 
great worker, and every great man must 
of necessity be a great worker. No 
mere sense of duty, no whip of necessity, 
could ever have drawn out such a magni- 
ficent and unbroken activity as that which 
made the history of Mr. Gladstone. 
We all need to come into closer contact 
with our work. It is not enough to 
make a sense of duty wait upon it; it is 
not enough to brood over it in thought, 
285 



Works and Days 

penetrating it with ideas, and giving it 
the order of a new and fresher method ; 
we must press it to our hearts if, for our- 
selves and for others, we would transform 
what might be its drudgery into the 
discipline that makes character, and trans- 
mute its hard materialism into something 
spiritual and satisfying. 



286 



ASPIRATION AND AMBITION 

ASPIRATION and ambition repre- 
sent two very different motives 
and attitudes, although they are often 
confused in popular speech. The ambi- 
tious man, by reason of the purely selfish 
character of the underlying principle of 
his life, may be entirely devoid of aspira- 
tion, although the brilliancy of his career 
often confuses the minds of people and 
conveys the impression that he possesses 
that which is in no sense his. The as- 
piring man, on the other hand, is often 
accused of ambition, although of this last 
infirmity of great minds he may lack 
even the average endowment. In fact, 
nothing creates more confusion in life 
than this inability to discern between the 
fundamental motives of different lives. 
Acts which are identical in appearance 
are often so widely separated in motive 
that they are entirely blameworthy in 
287 



Works and Days 

one instance and entirely praiseworthy in 
the other. The ambitious man desires 
advancement, and place and wealth and 
influence, because these things contribute 
to some purpose apart from the growth 
of his own character ; because these are 
so many keys with which he proposes to 
unlock the treasure-house of life, al- 
though when these treasures lie within 
his hand he has no thought about their 
use except a selfish one. The aspiring 
man, on the other hand, cares most of 
all for the development of his own 
nature ; his desire is not to get the most 
out of life, like FalstafF, but to put the 
most into it, like Paul or Luther. He 
feels the steady pressure of the highest 
impulses upon his soul ; he recognizes 
the constant solicitation of the noblest 
opportunities, and he responds to the one 
and pours himself into the other, not for 
what they shall give him, but for what, 
through them, he shall bestow upon the 
others. 

The true artist is not the man who 
288 



Aspiration and Ambition 

waits eagerly for recognition, or who 
studies the popular taste to find out by 
what trick of his brush he may make 
sure of frequent appearance on the line 
at the exhibition ; the true artist is con- 
sumed by a mighty thirst for beauty, 
impelled by a mighty impulse to express 
that which lies within the vision of his 
own soul. The true man of letters is 
not he who studies the fluctuations of 
taste and furnishes wares for the market, 
but he who feels the irresistible impulse 
of some great truth seeking for ex- 
pression through him ; such an one is 
constantly under the spell of the master- 
teacher. Life, and, as a sincere and single- 
hearted pupil, has no other desire but to 
learn and speak the truth. An aspiring 
man stands in small need of the praise 
of his contemporaries or the regard of 
the multitude ; although these are not 
without satisfaction and use to him, his 
main purpose is with himself in the 
noblest sense. He feels that he has 
been intrusted with a great and rare gift, 
19 289 



Works and Days 

and that his life work is not to seek that 
which shall gratify his pride or his vanity, 
but to bring out symmetrically, beauti- 
fully, and purely that which lies like an 
unspent and undeveloped power within 
himself. An aspiring life, wisely lived, 
in the end brings its own external re- 
wards and recognition ; and the man of 
aspiration can wear safely all the honors 
which the world chooses to put upon 
him. These things come to him, not as 
objects external to himself, which he has 
grasped with selfish hands, but as the 
normal fruit of the ripening of his own 
life ; there is no poison in them for him ; 
there is no power of seduction in them ; 
they cannot satisfy, nor can they arrest 
his career. When he has secured them 
all they are as nothing to him, because 
his life is still to go on in higher ventures 
and to more remote ends. 

What is needed in the world is not 

ambition but aspiration ; not men who 

are seeking office and power and wealth 

for themselves, but men whose overflow 

290 



Aspiration and Ambition 

of energy and intelligence and whose 
creative work and influence produce these 
things as naturally as the orchard pro- 
duces its autumnal fruit. In the long 
run the world knows its great men, and 
knows that they are men of aspiration. 
It is true that aspiration is sometimes 
mixed with ambition ; but it is also true 
that the work of a man's hand or brain 
which remains a permanent possession 
to humanity is always the expression of 
the truth that was in him, and not of the 
falsehood ; sooner or later that which 
was false passes away, and only that 
which was true remains. In business, 
in the professions, in art, in literature, 
and in public life, it is the aspiring man 
who is the natural and only safe leader ; 
he is the man who is ready to say with 
Lincoln : " If this sentence in my mes- 
sage is true I would rather fail with it 
then succeed by suppression of it.'* He 
is ready, with Gladstone, to go out of 
office for a principle, but he is never 
ready to remain in office without one. 
291 



Works and Days 

Aspiration is the one quality which 
makes life cumulative, which forbids any 
halting in the long career of growth, 
which, without resting and without hast- 
ing, impels a man onward to the com- 
plete unfolding of himself The aspiring 
man never rests content with any per- 
formance, however the world may ap- 
plaud. To him all the works of his 
hands are inadequate — there is always 
something more in his mind than he has 
been able to express ; there is always 
something nobler in his conception than 
his hand has conveyed to the eyes of 
others. When fame comes to him it 
does not build a wall of caution about 
him and lock its gates upon his courage 
and his independence ; it spurs him on 
to still nobler efforts ; instead of being 
an anchor which holds him stationary in 
some fair and peaceful port, it is a sail 
which bears him still seaward with the 
illimitable ocean before him. 



292 



THE GRACE OF ACCEPTANCE 

THERE are many sincere and 
honorable men and women, with a 
fine sense of independence, who are gen- 
erous in giving and niggardly in receiv- 
ing ; who bestow upon others with a 
liberal hand, but who find it hard to 
accept those services and kindnesses 
which they love to bestow. But one 
cannot be really generous who refuses 
to his fellows the pleasure he takes to 
himself. There is nothing within one's 
reach quite so satisfying as throwing 
a door of opportunity open to some one 
who stands in sore need of the larger 
chance ; nothing quite so delightful as 
putting one who craves music, art, books, 
nature, in the way of enjoying these 
things. In a thousand ways life gains 
sweetness through the consciousness of 
the ability to do small kindnesses, to 
293 



Works and Days 

render minor services, to exercise a little 
thoughtfulness and courtesy. But no 
one has a right to take this pleasure to 
himself and deny it to others ; to insist 
upon giving, and at the same time refuse 
to receive. He only truly gives who 
receives as generously as he bestows. 
He who gives lavishly to me, but refuses 
to allow me to give to him, declares to 
all the world that he recognizes his own 
stewardship of all that he possesses, but 
denies mine ; he affirms his own duty, 
but ignores mine. This means the divi- 
sion of a responsibility which ought to 
rest whole and entire on all men and 
women. It is, at bottom, disloyalty to 
the principle that we are children of one 
Father, members of one household, and 
heirs of one estate. It is a false idea 
of independence which makes a man 
unwilling to lay himself under obligations 
to others. It is, to begin with, im- 
possible for any man to live and avoid 
putting himself under the heaviest obliga- 
tions. Everything has been done for us 
294 



The Grace of Acceptance 

before we are born : life, law, nature, 
God first; then society, government, 
school ; then art, literature, pleasure, and 
profit in countless forms — all these await 
a man when he arrives, naked, helpless, 
and ignorant, at the gate of the world. 
At the very beginning he is so loaded 
down with obligations that, no matter 
how great his services and how long and 
arduous his life, he goes out of the world 
hopelessly in debt to his fellows. But 
the world is not a place of barter, hard 
as some men strive to make it such ; it 
is a vast school, on a divine foundation, 
where everything is given in order that it 
may be given again. Every pupil who 
learns his lesson gives and takes with 
equal pleasure. 



'95 



THE BETTER WAY 

THE ideal life, as most men and 
women think of it, would be one 
utterly free from all claims upon time 
and resources which would check its 
movement, dwarf its growth, or impede 
its swift and orderly progress. Most 
of the rebellion against our circumstances 
arises from the feeling we have that they 
restrict, limit, and narrow us ; we should 
like to be set free, and we fancy that if 
no responsibilities or duties were imposed 
upon us other than those we choose for 
ourselves, we should move swiftly and 
irresistibly forward, accomplishing all our 
purposes and turning all our dreams 
into facts. But the divine way of ob- 
taining freedom is very different from 
the human way. There is no truth 
which men and women accept so slowly 
and with so much pain of heart and 
mind as the truth that freedom comes 
296 



The Better Way 

through patience, and that our Hfe gets 
its richness and strength, not by working 
itself out according to our plans, but by 
submitting itself to the direction of 
another. Every one of us has some 
little structure which he would like to 
complete for himself, laying the founda- 
tions, building the walls, spreading the 
roof, and adorning it without and within 
according to his own design. But God 
sets us at work upon an edifice so vast 
that our work upon it is only a small 
detail, and we are such inferior artists 
that we would prefer to be the architects 
of the small design rather than the 
builders of the great temple. There is 
not one of us upon whom some kind of 
restriction is not laid ; not one of us 
whose free, spontaneous movement of 
life is not checked by the weakness of 
some other whose work we have to add 
to our own. While we are doing the 
work of the day with all our might and 
with entire success, some one else near 
to us falls by inefficiency or by positive 
297 



Works and Days 

evil of nature, and we are obliged to 
stop and add his load to our own. 
Instead of doing the thing we would 
like, which would bring completeness to 
our life in our eyes, we must pick up a 
wearisome burden that has no inspira- 
tion in it, and carry it with a constant 
fear of loss. Many a woman's life would 
be far richer in her external activities 
and opportunities if she were not taking 
upon her own shoulders the deficiencies 
and weaknesses of others ; many a man 
would have larger education, more con- 
genial social surroundings, a sweeter life, 
if it were not for the responsibilities he as- 
sumes for those who are unable or un- 
willing to meet their own responsibilities. 
There are times when the best nature 
revolts against this apparent waste ; and 
yet it is precisely through this discipline 
that men and women are molded into 
nobler spiritual stature ; it is by patient 
submission to restriction, by cheerful 
bearing of the burdens of others, by un- 
complaining acceptance of conditions 
298 



The Better Way 

imposed upon us by the weaknesses and 
sin of those that we love, that the truest 
liberty and the most enduring strength 
are won. Christ's life was the very 
opposite of that which, from any human 
conception, a divine nature would seek 
for itself; and yet it is plain that its 
highest divinity lay in its cheerful sur- 
render to the hardness and barrenness 
of human conditions. He came not to 
be ministered unto, but to minister, and 
He saved His life by losing it. 



299 



16 1902 
APR. 26 1902 



MAY 3 1902 



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